Charlee reads
“Believing is Seeing:
Biology as Ideology”
Today I will be reading Judith Lorber’s “Biology
as Ideology” (1992). In lieu of a biography
attached to the essay, I have again grabbed one
from Wikipedia:
Judith Lorber is Professor Emerita of Sociology and
Women’s Studies at The CUNY Graduate Center and
Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. She
is a foundational theorist of social construction of
gender difference and has played a vital role in the
formation and transformation of gender studies. She
has more recently called for a de-gendering of the social
world.
I was hoping to read a trans author this week, but
decided to address more a foundational work in
gender studies before I attempt to tackle more
recent work. This essay follows a theme which I
am (perhaps obviously) very interested in: the
social construction of biological sex.
Summary of Main Points:
● Before the 1700s, women were considered
inferior because of “god-given” natural
laws, not because of biological difference;
as culture became more secular, a new
justification was needed
● Bodily functions such as menstruation do
not determine the social category
“woman” (e.g. trans women are socially
women), nor does it determine its
anatomical counterpart, “female” (e.g.
post-menopausal cis women are still
“biologically” female)
● Among “males” and “females” there are
more in-group physiological differences
than between-group physiological
differences
● “Sports … construct men’s bodies to be
powerful; women’s bodies to be sexual”
(573). Technology, on the other hand,
“constructs gendered skills” (574)
● “Male bodies” and “female bodies” do
have physical differences, but “these
differences are socially meaningless until
social practices transform them into social
facts” (576)
● Feminist analysis should focus on
uncovering social categories organically,
rather than assuming “male/female” or
“man/woman” dichotomies
Gender and Biological Sex
Lorber, in agreement with modern biology,
claims that the “male/female” binary is a false
one. If you are unfamiliar with this idea, I suggest
you take a moment to peruse the ISAN website.
In the late 1800s, whether or not an intersex child
had ovaries was the deciding factor in gender
assignment; a woman who could not procreate
was not a woman at all. Nowadays, t he length of
the penis/clitoral tissue is the determining factor.
So it is clear that, historically, biological sex has
been a fluid idea. Sex categories are formed in
part by cultural beliefs about gender.
Lorber goes on to illustrate the arbitrariness of
these categories using the rigid gender divide in
sports competitions.
Gender and Sports
For men, sports are both a “way [to construct]
masculine identity” and a “legitimated outlet for
violence and aggression” (571). Successful
female athletes are often derided as
“unfeminine” due to these masculine
connotations. Attempts by woman athletes to
rebrand fitness as “feminine” and “sexy” have
been largely unsuccessful… but male approval
shouldn’t be the goal in the first place.
Social ideas about what men and women should
be physically capable of result in diminished
expectations for female athletes, e.g., “[in] the
1992 Winter Olympics, men figure skaters were
required to complete three triple jumps in their
required program; women figure skaters were
forbidden to do more than one” (572). As late as
the 1970s, women were advised against
competing by fear-mongering “doctors” who
warned that excessive physical activity could
negatively affect fertility. This becomes a
self-fulfilling prophecy: of course women won’t
perform as well as men when they are actively
discouraged from doing so.
Professional sports is an even more hostile
environment for those who blur the male/female
divide. Invasive chromosome and genital tests
have been used to police intersex and transgender
athletes; these tests still persist today and are
exclusively applied to those competing as women.
Some cis women discover they are intersex for
the first time because of this mandatory
“testing.” One can only imagine how traumatic
this is, especially since these “gender tests” are
often “accidentally” leaked to the media. This
humiliating treatment of trans and intersex
women clearly stems from the misogynistic belief
that a competent athlete cannot possibly be a
“real” woman.
Gender and Technology
Lorber begins her section on technology by citing
a relatively well-known sociological fact:
[S]tudies of gender differences in spatial and
mathematical ability have found that men have a large
advantage in ability to mentally rotate an image, a
moderate advantage in a visual perception of
horizontality and verticality and in mathematical
performance, and a small advantage in ability to pick a
figure out of a field. (Hyde 1990)
Is it possible that socialization plays a role in
creating this difference? Boys are encouraged to
play with legos and other “construction-type”
toys, which could enhance spacial skills; girls, on
the other hand, are encouraged to play with dolls,
which could enhance social/emotional skills.
Unwilling to accept a “biological” justification at
face value, Lorber seeks out an alternative
explanation for this phenomena.
In the 1940s, computer programming was
considered “simple” and “clerical” work, and
thus suitable for women. Women therefore
constituted majority of computer specialists
during this time period. As the “intellectually
demanding” nature of the work became apparent,
however, more men began to take interest in
computer science; women were either pushed out
of the field or into lower-paying jobs. It seems
cultural ideas about what is “suitable” for women
have a lot more to do with women’s absence from
technical fields than any supposed lack of skill.
Gender and Bathroom Use
To my surprise, Lorber’s section on bathroom use
did not even mention trans people. I suppose this
essay was written long before we became visible
in mainstream culture. Still, she mentions trans
people in the “sports” section of her essay, so
you’d think we’d warrant mentioning here…but I
digress.
Lorber describes her “bathroom problem” as one
example of “the social transformation of male
and female physiology into a condition of
inequality” (577). The problem is as follows:
Most buildings that have gender-segregated bathrooms
have an equal number for women and for men. Where
there are crowds, there are always long lines in front of
women’s bathrooms but rarely in front of men’s
bathrooms. The cultural, physiological, and
demographic combinations of clothing, frequency of
urination, menstruation, and child care add up to
generally greater bathroom use by women than men.
Thus, although an equal number of bathrooms seems
fair, equity would mean more women’s bathrooms or
allowing women to use men’s bathrooms for a certain
amount of time. (Molotch 1988)
Another obvious solution is abandoning gendered
restrooms altogether, but Lorber does not
mention this explicitly.
She goes on to say that the “bathroom problem”
is just one consequence of treating men’s bodies
as the default; ask people to visualize a generic
human being and they will likely picture a (white,
able-bodied) man. Women can never just be
“human” because (unlike men’s experiences)
women’s experiences are not “universal.”
Gender and Human Nature
In this last section, Lorber reiterates her
conclusion: gender is a consequence of culture,
not biological sex. Invoking Butler, she goes so
far as to say that “‘human nature’ is […] a lways
(emphasis original) a manifestation of cultural
meanings, social relationships, and power
politics”, never a biological inevitability (578).
Lorber calls on others to stop using the
male/female binary as the end-all-be-all of
feminist analysis. Social categories should
develop organically from observation, not from
cultural preconceptions about what categories
should exist. She goes on to describe the potential
benefits of such a method:
[The] process of discovering categories from similarities
and differences in people’s behavior or responses can be
more meaningful for feminist research than discovering
similarities and differences between “females” and
“males” or “women” and “men” because the social
construction of the conventional sex and gender
categories already assumes differences between them
and similarities among them. (578)
When you’re looking for differences between
“males” and “females” you’ll find them; when
you’re looking for similarities, you’ll find those,
too. The gender/sex binary has outlived its
usefulness as a tool of feminist analysis. It’s time
to start looking beyond.
End Note
I find it disappointing (or should I say
cisappointing…) that despite Lorber’s claim that
trans women are “socially women,” she
misgenders Renee Richards, a trans woman who
sued the IAAF for its unfair “chromosome test.”
Other than that, I enjoyed this essay. It was an
easy read with a straightforward argument.
