Laurie Essig

Semenya, sex and sports

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Remember the case of South African runner Caster Semenya?  Her gender was questioned by the International Association of Athletic Federations after she competed in Berlin last summer for  the World Athletics Championships.  At question for the last ten months was whether or not Semenya was female or not.  Fortunately for Semenya, medical experts decided yesterday that she was female enough to continue competing. That's good news for Semenya, who has endured ten months of scientific scrutiny as well as media attention. According to many observers, the lesson to be learned is that athletes' privacy should be protected. Woman and Children's Minister Noluthando Mayende Sibiya said

The privacy of Caster was violated very, very seriously.  We need to ensure that the laws of the country are tightened so that the rights of people are observed and protected in that regard."

The minister had written a letter to the United Nations last year complaining about the "blatant disregard for Caster's human dignity.  Nobody should be made to suffer in the way Caster was made to suffer in the past several months," she wrote. But the need for privacy is surely not the only lesson to be learned from Semenya's case.  Instead, the real lesson is that binary sex, the foundation of modern sporting competition, is a fiction.   The truth is, sex is far more messy than a binary.  As we know from the Semenya case, but a variety of other athletes as well, bodies and chromosomes come in more shades than black or white,  penis or vagina or XX or XY. Indeed, there are women with XNull chromosomes and even XXY chromosomes.  There are bodies with both testes and a vagina.  And to make matters even more difficult to figure out, there are a variety of persons taking hormones for a variety of reasons-- from birth control to a desire to be more "masculine" or more "feminine."  In other words, between intersexed bodies, transgendered bodies, and hypergendered bodies, how are we supposed to find a nice separation between male and female in the future when that separation was always far from stable? And can sports survive without imagining sex as either this or that?  Modern sports were founded on the assumption that men required physical activity to remain masculine in the face of an increasing "office-i-cation" of labor.  As farmers and factory workers moved into white collar or at least service sector jobs, they lost the physicality of labor.  Thus "sports" were invented- as part of schools as well as communities- to turn boys into men. Women's sports were more complicated, more dangerous to the sexual binary.  If sports could make a man out of a boy, what could they do to a woman?  And masculinized women were dangerous not just to the sexual binary, but to heterosexuality as well since she was always assumed to be a lesbian.  Still, despite the dangers of sports to women, girls pursued them with a passion, especially after the passage of Title IX.  Sure they worked hard to feminize sports- to wear "cute" little outfits or flock to sports that made them thin (like track or tennis) and not sports that might bulk them up (like rugby or bodybuilding).  But still, despite the anxiety over sports as a masculinizing influence, women's sports grew alongside men's. And yet, what to do when someone like Semenya comes along?  Clearly muscular, clearly fast, clearly not trying to look feminine, Semenya's body and gender presentation acts as threat to the supposedly clear separation between men and women.  Indeed, her body is so threatening that it had to be studied for ten months to decide to which sex it belongs. And the conclusion of the experts: female.  But the conclusion of the rest of us:  sex is messy.

Post-gender patriarchy

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In the rather privileged and isolated world of academe, a binary and rigid gender system is seemingly a thing of the past.  Decades of feminism and feminist scholarship have shaped students' ideas about what they can and cannot do.  Women can be scientists; men can be stay-at-home parents.  Women can play rugby; men can decide not to play sports. In addition to feminism, a growing transgender movement on campus means that things like gender neutral bathrooms and getting to choose what name and what gender signifiers are on your transcript are increasingly commonplace. It's not that college campuses feel "post-gender," but they definitely feel post-gender-binary. And yet loosening our ties to gender might mean we can no longer respond to patriarchy when we see it. No longer feeling "solidarity with our sisters," most women (and men) don't know what to make of news stories like these.  After all, words like "patriarchy" fell out of fashion with 3rd wave feminism's insistence on giving women subjectivity and a role in creating the systems in which they live.  Patriarchy also seemed increasingly difficult to pin down given post-modernist ideas about the lack of a fixed and stable gender subject. But surely patriarchy is a word we must revive- even if we say it is not about men per se - when confronted with the misogyny mixed with male privilege that seems to be running rampant off of college campuses.  For instance, in Iran "bad" women are being blamed for causing earthquakes. According to a CNN report,

The prayer leader, Hojatoleslam Kazim Sadeghi, says women and girls who "don't dress appropriately" spread "promiscuity in society... When promiscuity spreads, earthquakes increase," he says in a video posted Monday on YouTube, apparently of him leading Friday prayers in Tehran, Iran, last week.

In Mexico, a pregnant 10-year old, who was raped by her stepfather, is being forced to give birth to the child despite serious risks to her health.  Because of the Catholic Church's vocal opposition to abortion in Mexico and the rise of conservative groups, this is hardly the only case of forced pregnancy on a child.

This girl is much more than an isolated case," said Adriana Ortiz-Ortega, a researcher at Mexico's National Autonomous University who has written two books on abortion in Mexico, "and there is much more influence now from conservative groups that are trying to prevent the legalization of abortion."

As I wrote back in February, similar forced pregnancies are happening in Nicaragua as a result of state-Church alliances that define "real Nicaraguans" as opposed to abortion and abortion-rights activists as "foreign." Meanwhile, back on the post-gender campuses that I inhabit, sexual assault is a constant threat and is nearly always committed by a particular gendered and sexed body and most of the time on a differently gendered and sexed body.  At a nearby university, there are details coming out about a particularly brutal assault on a young woman by two men, the 9th reported on the campus this year.  On my own campus, a variety of stories of sexual (and gendered) assault float in and out of public discussion, although few are reported to police. The underreporting of sexual violence on college campuses is a national problem.  Why so few sexual assaults on campus are reported to police is unclear- partly it is an effort to protect the survivors of such assaults from a judicial system that is, for lack of a better word, patriarchal and partly it is because sexual assault is not seen as fully a crime because of what can only be called patriarchal attitudes by campus administrators. Living in a post-gender world that is simultaneously patriarchal may seem impossible, an oxymoron written on the body and lives of academic sorts like me. But I think post-gender might be the correct response to patriarchy- an absolute refusal to locate ourselves on either side of the gender binary so that humans with any sort of body parts and any gender expression can join together to say that bodies- of whatever gender- deserve protection from state interference in the form of forced pregnancy, hate speech in the form of blaming "women," and violence. In this post-gender world, we must all be "sisters" against patriarchy, even if we have a penis.

The news is so gay

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I read the news today.  And oh boy was it gay.  Too gay, not gay enough, dangerously gay. What is going on with the cultural consciousness of America that it is so obsessed with all things gay? It started out with Olympic figure skater Johnny Weir.  Apparently two Canadian journalists called him "too gay for figure skating."  Hello?  Figure skating?  Gay?  Going on the Joy Behar show, Weir said that he supported "free speech" but asked why commentators never talked about anyone being "too butch" for a sport.  He also pointed out that there are a lot of kids like him and he worried about the effect such comments would have on them. Over at Fox News, there's a nice little controversy over whether reality TV starlet Kim Zolciak is "really" a lesbian or whether her relationship with another woman  is a "publicity stunt."

She may be known for her scandalous relationship with a married man, but word has emerged that "Real Housewives of Atlanta" star Kim Zolciak is now batting for the same team.Over the weekend, the 31-year-old divorced mother of two stepped out with DJ Tracy Young, her apparent lesbian lover of three months and the lady behind the remix of her dance single “Tardy for the Party”  at “The Blacks’ Annual Gala” in Miami.

Then of course there's the ongoing gays in the military controversy.  According to an AP story from earlier today, some Republicans have already dismissed the military's planned 9-month study of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" as "biased" in favor of repealing the policy.

'Many of us on this committee have serious concerns with putting our men and women in uniform through such a divisive debate while they are fighting two wars,' said Rep. Buck McKeon of California, the full committee's top Republican. McKeon is also unhappy with the selection of the RAND Corp. think tank to do much of the legwork for the study... McKeon told Pentagon officials working on the review that the company had "significant shortcomings" in past work analyzing the issue and partnered with a group advocating repeal last year.

Although all of these stories are fascinating in their own right-- especially the one involving reality TV starlets-- I think the more interesting trend is the need to mark off spaces and bodies and even sports and soldiers as either "gay" or "straight." This need is the result of 150 years of the history of sexuality, but because part of the history of sexuality is to insist that sex is "natural" and does not have a history, we don't usually think too much about it. Our current beliefs that there are gay people and there are straight people and that therefore spaces and bodies are easily separated into one or the other began with the Victorians (as most of our culture did).  Victorian sexologists invented the homosexual (and the heterosexual) as stable entities, persons rather than practices, nouns instead of verbs. As a society, America has been policing the "sexuality line" as carefully as it polices the "color line" ever since.  Indeed, the color line and the sexuality line have always been related projects with the protection of straight white women and men from Black men but also homosexual contagion at the center of much legal and medical intervention.  And, like the color line, the sexuality line is equally unclear, with people passing back and forth and making the inhabitants of either side anxious about identity confusion and monstrous mixtures. But this has been going on for 150 years.  Why is today's news so anxious about policing the sexuality line?  What exactly is going on in our culture that the news is so gay? Perhaps it is the result of economic collapse and military quagmires?  Perhaps the same forces that push Tea Party members to rage against big government push journalists to express anxiety about collapsing sexual borders?  If Olympic athletes can be both amazingly strong and disciplined and gay men, then how do we mark gay men as "weak" and straight men as "strong"?  If soldiers are allowed to have desires for humans rather than for the "opposite" sex, then how can masculinity and femininity be upheld?  After all, when the homosexual was invented, s/he was invented as a gender invert- a feminine man or masculine woman.  What if a soldier can be a masculine man in love with another masculine man?  The entire sex/gender system, what queer theorist Judith Butler calls "the heterosexual matrix," collapses.  And what if hot starlets have hot female lovers?  How can they be "sexy" and "feminine" and also lesbian if lesbians are imagined as masculine to keep straight women girlie? Suddenly all the privileges of being straight and white and properly gendered are up for grabs.  White, middle class status is no longer a guarantee of a good future in bed or in business.   What can we do?  Go join a white racist movement like the Tea Party and rage against Obama and social security.  Or write and read stories that reaffirm our sexual status as stable and unassailable. We tell ourselves that we are either straight or gay, male or female, masculine or feminine.  The lives of ice skaters, starlets and soldiers reassure us that heterosexuality, the last "truth" of modernity and barely contested site of social privilege, will be  left standing.

Urinary panic strikes Maine

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Ah, urinary segregation.  The moment at which, according to Jacques Lacan, we learn whether we are boys or girls.  Do you go into the room with the icon of the person in pants or a skirt (so we also learn the sartorial signifiers of sex and gender as well).   And of course it's a perfect system of sexual socialization: because everybody has to pee, everybody has to choose a gender.  But just one. Now, according to the Christian Civil League of Maine, those crazy "homosexuals" and their "homosexual agenda" are trying to destroy this basic foundation of gender difference.  According to a statement in the Bangor Daily News,

The Christian Civic League of Maine believes that these new guidelines are not merely an error in judgment on the part of the Maine Human Rights Commission. Rather, they represent the latest effort by the homosexual lobby to impose their confused views of sexuality on society at large.”

At issue is an effort by the Maine Human Rights Commission to do what is being done throughout the country: deal with binary urinary space in a country with a growing number of transgender-identified citizens.  In Maine, a young female-identified student was denied access to a girls' bathroom because she was born male.  But whatever you may think a transgendered person's "true" identity is, it is not "simply" what sex they were assigned at birth. And despite what the Christian Civic League of Maine thinks, these are not issues of sexuality (desire), but of sex (male/female) and gender (masculine/feminine).  In other words, there is a diversity of gender expression going on in our schools and throughout the country and the binary urinary space of his and hers bathrooms is no longer able to accommodate how Americans  live and pee. And although many of us may believe that "we have always had his and her bathrooms and we always will," that is clearly wrong.  We didn't even have bathrooms or outhouses until fairly recently in human history.   Humans went more or less wherever, without the benefit of toilet paper or much privacy, let alone a strict binary urinary segregation. The Maine Human Rights Commission, despite the panic, seems interested in keeping binary urinary space in place.  They'll still have boys and girls bathrooms, but you can enter based on your gender expression rather than the sex assigned at birth.  I have to say this seems like a bad idea, for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is it still forces a binary notion of gender onto an increasingly gender-diverse society. But what is the answer to urinary segregation?  Every year I pose that as a final-exam question in my course on gender.  The question is posed in the future: "Twenty years from now you are an architect and have to build a large building.  What will you do about the bathrooms?" And every year students come up with ingenious designs for how we'll go in the future. Generally the students imagine circular rooms with a variety of closed stalls: urinal (which biological females can use thanks to those clever plastic urinary devices like the She-Wee), wheelchair accessible toilets, toilets, toilets with baby changing table, etc.  In this way, urinary space becomes about what you need to do rather than gender expression. But what to do with bathrooms as they already exist?  I would argue we let the students decide.  For the most part, younger Americans have grown up with far more diversity of gender expression and thus they're far less panicked about peeing.

Queer in Russia: A Story of Sex, Self, and the Other

 

In her first book Essig considers how sexual otherness-- queerness-- played out differently in Russia than it did in the West.  By looking at how expert notions of sexual otherness, like the law, medicine and psychiatry, competed with self-understandings from queers themselves, Essig is able to tell the story of sexual difference in Russia as well as how sexual practices sometimes do not become central to the self.

You can order it from Amazon here.

Recent Media About Laurie Essig

Snob

MacCleans

Time 

American Plastic: Boob Jobs, Credit Cards and Our Quest for Perfection

Published by Beacon Press in 2010, American Plastic treats cosmetic surgery as if it were the subprime mortgage crisis of the body. The deregulation of banking, the commercialization of medicine, and the targeting of some of America's most vulnerable citizens with high-interest medical loans created a perfect storm of greed and desire that played out on to bodies of ordinary Americans caught in the quest for perfection- or at least a better life.

 

India officially beats US in the sex wars

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Let's face it.  The US loses in most competitions with India at this point.   Sure the US has  the biggest military ever assembled, but we kinda suck at the whole math and science education thing, we don't really produce much worth buying (although we are number one at consumption) and even Hollywood is increasingly losing out to Bollywood for pure entertainment value, set designs, music, and even hipness. But now the US has lost to India in the sex wars.

Indian election authorities have granted what they called an independent identity to gays and transsexuals -- a third gender -- on the country's voter lists. Members of these groups were referred to as male or female on the voter rolls in the past. Now they will have the choice to pick "O" -- for others -- when indicating their gender on voter forms, the Indian election commission said in a statement Thursday. India, home to more than 1 billion people, has 714 million registered voters.

India creates third gender for voters - UPI.com. In order to unpack what happened and how the US lost again, let's figure out what these sex wars are and what winning them might look like. "Sex"- bodily identification as male or female- is generally separated out from "gender"- which is more like your performance- as masculine or feminine.  In this way, you can be a man in your body, but have a gender performance that is feminine let's say. In the past 20 years or so, gender theory has increasingly asked whether these are really two separate categories at all.  Judith Butler, in her 1989 Gender Trouble, famously asked, what if sex has been gender all along? In other words, what if this thing- this bodily thing- that we think is stable and real and easily readable as "male" or "female' is in fact as messy and unclear as when a woman fixes the engine on her car in overalls and high heels?  Historians like Thom Lacqueur have added to this sense that "gender" and "sex" are both the same and both messy by showing how the two sex system is fairly recent, like Reformation recent.  Fom the Classical Greeks till about 1600 or so, Western doctors and laypeople alike thought there was ONE sex (and it was male- women were just inverted versions of the more perfect male form).  The interesting thing about the one sex model is it allowed for those who were not one nor the other (their genitals were not fully inverted- like a woman's-- nor fully extroverted-like a man- so the "in-betweens" did not cause a category crisis). The two-sex model demanded humans be male or female.  No messiness.  Bodies can not be "both" nor can they be "neither."  Since the mid 1900s, whenever a body did not conform to the binary, it has generally been treated as a "medical emergency" and reshaped to fit our preconceived notions of sex, even though the result is often total lack of sexual pleasure and even pain as an adult. The treatment of "intersex" babies is so clearly an imposition of binary thinking on messy bodies that feminist biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling has argued that we should allow for at least 5 sexes to describe how babies are actually born instead of how we wish they were born. But how, and why, did the messiness of sex and gender get tangled up with "gays"?  For that, we had to wait for the Victorian sexologists, and their notion that homosexuality was a form of gender inversion (manly women, feminine men) that was written on the body as a lack of sexual dimorphism. In other words, the body is a mess.  Naturally so, but we now insist bodies be neat and fit into a binary because of the imposition of human ideal forms onto it, ideal forms that are now not just philosophical or scientific, but commercial and for-profit as well. The only way to "win" the sex wars, is to refuse to participate in them.  To allow people to check "other" and "both" and "neither" rather than forcing them into m/f ideal form that so clearly does not fit how bodies are shaped nor how bodies perform. And so India is now way ahead of the US in the sex wars.  But this is one war we could actually win and no one would die and it wouldn't cost a lot of money.  If only we could remove ourselves from 500 years of binary thinking and a hundred years of creating the homosexual as having a very messy sex/gender (and the heterosexual as having a very clearly defined sex that goes along with the appropriate gender- manly men or femme women). Of course. winning the sex wars would take real leadership and courage.  And that is another thing India seems to have a lot more of than we do.

Ending gender in Vermont school bathrooms

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Kids today.  Why can't they be like we were?  Gendered in every way?  Oh wait, we weren't gendered in every way, but institutions like schools tried to make us conform.  When I was in high school, only girls could take HomeEc; only boys could take Shop.  When I flunked HomeEc in 8th grade (my skirt looked more like a deconstructed cleaning rag), I was told that I had to do summer school if I wanted to go onto high school. I also got a long lecture on why I was failing at my role at being a girl.  Girls sew.  Boys build.  Girls use the girls bathroom; boys the boys.  There are no spaces that are not clearly marked and there are no bodies that are not one or the other. Of course this wasn't true 25 years ago when I was in high school and it's not true today.  The difference is there's a gender revolution afoot from the "kids" who are beginning to insist that the gender binary and the urinary segregation that is its most visible space be broadened to include a diversity of gender expression. One such young person is Kyle Giard-Chase, a 16 year old who lives just down the road from me who testified before the Vermont Human Rights Commission yesterday to ask for gender neutral bathrooms in all Vermont schools. Giard-Chase, who identifies as transgender and male, spoke about how difficult using the girls' bathrooms was for him and how much harassment he endured while still identifying as female.

''It was the fear and apprehension of possibly having to use the bathroom during the school day that caused me the most harm,'' he said. ''By eighth grade I had almost made a game out of waiting for the end of the day so I could use the bathroom at my own home.'' ''This procedure of 'holding it' caused me to pay less attention in class, neglect my studies, and fear going to school in the morning,'' he said. Transgender Vt. Teen Wants Genderless Bathrooms - NYTimes.com.

According to Christopher Neff, the director of Outright Vermont, an organization for queer and transgender youth,

The new state-wide effort seeks to establish at least one gender neutral bathroom facility in each middle school and high school in Vermont by working with local Gay/Straight Alliance (GSA) groups, school administrators and policy makers. Often, gender neutral bathrooms are one stall unisex facilities. The need for accessible gender neutral bathrooms was rated as the top priority of youth attendees at Outright Vermont's 2009 GSA Conference in Rutland in May.

It all seems reasonable and even a necessary part of breaking down the gender binary.  But there is nothing reasonable about maintaining gender aparthied.  It is one of the many ways that not just a hierarchy of gender is maintained- male over female- but a hierarchy of gender normativity is maintained- feminine girls over masculine girls. It is this hairball of power that will, no doubt, cause a lot of the adults in charge of Vermont's schools to cough up some ridiculous reasons why boys must be boys and girls must be girls and everyone else must suffer.

Ending gender in Vermont school bathrooms

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Kids today.  Why can't they be like we were?  Gendered in every way?  Oh wait, we weren't gendered in every way, but institutions like schools tried to make us conform.  When I was in high school, only girls could take HomeEc; only boys could take Shop.  When I flunked HomeEc in 8th grade (my skirt looked more like a deconstructed cleaning rag), I was told that I had to do summer school if I wanted to go onto high school. I also got a long lecture on why I was failing at my role at being a girl.  Girls sew.  Boys build.  Girls use the girls bathroom; boys the boys.  There are no spaces that are not clearly marked and there are no bodies that are not one or the other. Of course this wasn't true 25 years ago when I was in high school and it's not true today.  The difference is there's a gender revolution afoot from the "kids" who are beginning to insist that the gender binary and the urinary segregation that is its most visible space be broadened to include a diversity of gender expression. One such young person is Kyle Giard-Chase, a 16 year old who lives just down the road from me who testified before the Vermont Human Rights Commission yesterday to ask for gender neutral bathrooms in all Vermont schools. Giard-Chase, who identifies as transgender and male, spoke about how difficult using the girls' bathrooms was for him and how much harassment he endured while still identifying as female.

''It was the fear and apprehension of possibly having to use the bathroom during the school day that caused me the most harm,'' he said. ''By eighth grade I had almost made a game out of waiting for the end of the day so I could use the bathroom at my own home.'' ''This procedure of 'holding it' caused me to pay less attention in class, neglect my studies, and fear going to school in the morning,'' he said. Transgender Vt. Teen Wants Genderless Bathrooms - NYTimes.com.

According to Christopher Neff, the director of Outright Vermont, an organization for queer and transgender youth,

The new state-wide effort seeks to establish at least one gender neutral bathroom facility in each middle school and high school in Vermont by working with local Gay/Straight Alliance (GSA) groups, school administrators and policy makers. Often, gender neutral bathrooms are one stall unisex facilities. The need for accessible gender neutral bathrooms was rated as the top priority of youth attendees at Outright Vermont's 2009 GSA Conference in Rutland in May.

It all seems reasonable and even a necessary part of breaking down the gender binary.  But there is nothing reasonable about maintaining gender aparthied.  It is one of the many ways that not just a hierarchy of gender is maintained- male over female- but a hierarchy of gender normativity is maintained- feminine girls over masculine girls. It is this hairball of power that will, no doubt, cause a lot of the adults in charge of Vermont's schools to cough up some ridiculous reasons why boys must be boys and girls must be girls and everyone else must suffer.