In defense of genderlessness

in French) Bien que la réduction des inégalités associées au genre aille dans le sens d’une société plus juste, ce que la justice sociale exige réellement, c’est une société sans genre. L’idée-clef est la suivante : les relations de genre sont fondamentalement coercitives, au sens où elles imposent des contraintes auxquelles sont associées des sanctions sociales sur les choix et les pratiques des hommes et des femmes. Voilà ce que signifie le fait de dire que le genre est socialement construit. De telles contraintes vont à l’encontre de l’idéal égalitariste d’un monde dans lequel tous ont un accès égal aux moyens sociaux et matériels nécessaires à une vie accomplie. When egalitarians think about the normative issues linked to economic inequality, no one says that their deepest moral aspiration is for a world with “class equality”. Indeed, the expression “class equality” is an oxymoron, for the very concept of class implies some kind of inequality. One can certainly advocate a reduction in the inequalities between classes or the inequalities associated with class, but the normative ideal is usually specified as a “classless” society, not a society of class equality. This was canonized in the Marxist tradition as the emancipatory vision for communism: a classless society governed by the distributional norm “to each according to need, from each according to ability.” When egalitarians think about gender, on the other hand, they typically specify the normative ideal as “gender equality.” The concept of gender is not taken to inherently identify an inequality, but simply a set of socially constructed differences which only contingently are linked to inequalities of power, opportunities, wealth, status or income. The idea of a genderless society would seem to many people to be almost nonsensical and certainly not a necessary condition for the full realization of egalitarian ideals of social justice. In this paper I will defend the idea of genderlessness. I will argue that while reducing inequalities associated with gender constitutes movement in the direction of a just society, ultimately social justice requires genderlessness. The core idea is this: Gender relations are inherently coercive in the sense that they impose socially-enforced constraints on the choices and practices of men and women. This is what it means to say that gender is socially constructed. Such constraints, I will argue, thwart A r g u i ng a bo u t j u s t i c e 404 egalitarian ideals of a world in which all people have equal access to the social and material means necessary to live a flourishing life.1 The Sex-Gender Distinction To show that egalitarianism requires genderlessness we must first discuss in more detail the concept of gender and its relationship to sex, and the relationship between gender roles and biologically-rooted dispositions. A standard distinction is made in sociology between the concepts of sex and gender: sex is a biological category distinguishing males from females; gender is a social construction that transforms this biological distinction into a normatively enforced set of expectations about how men and women should behave and what roles they should fill. The key here is that for gender relations to exist there must be socially recognized norms that enforce these relations through various kinds of affirmations and sanctions.2 In some times and places these norms are enforced in extremely coercive ways, so that people pay a very heavy price for deviating from the prescribed roles. In other times and places the norms are much looser and the sanctions weaker. But in all cases enforcement exists: men and women, boys and girls, are expected to behave in specific ways and there are costs associated with significantly deviating from these expectations. If there are no normative pressures to behave in particular ways because of one’s sex, then gender relations do not exist.3 This distinction between sex and gender becomes especially complex when we add the issue of identity to the equation. In a stable, well-integrated gender order, gender norms and expectations get broadly internalized as gender identities. This makes in practice the distinction between sex and gender more difficult, for most people experience their gender identities as intimately connected to their biological sex. The issue of sexual orientation, as distinct from gender roles, adds a further complication. While sexuality 1 A fuller elaboration of this formulation of an egalitarian ideal social justice can be found in Wright 2010, chapter 2. 2 The “affirmations and sanctions” couplet comes from Göran Therborn (1980) 3 One other point of terminological clarification: Strictly speaking one could describe the absence of normatively enforced gender-specific roles as itself a form of gender relations, since this absence is certainly a “social construction”. In a society without gender-defined roles it would still be the case that the distinction between biological sexes is transformed through a social process into a structure of social relations among people, even though in this case those social relations do not specifically assign differentiated roles to males and females. The resulting relations could thus be awkwardly called genderless gender relations. (This is analogous to calling the social relations in a classless society, “classless class relations”). W r i gh t – I n d e f e ns e o f g e n d e r l e ss n es s 405 and sexual orientation are certainly also shaped by social practices, there is considerable evidence that they are to a significant extent directly anchored in biologically-based mechanisms. These mechanisms interact with the social processes that transform sex into gender to produce gender and sexual identities. To talk about the possibility of a genderless society is clearly not to talk about a sexless society. Nor is it to suggest that everyone would be androgynous in their identities and practices in the absence of gender relations. There would still be behaviors and dispositions that correspond to what we now view as feminine and masculine, and the mix of these would vary across persons. What would disappear is any systematic normative expectation that these traits and dispositions closely correspond to the distinction between males and females. And no costs would be associated with males and females having whatever pattern of “masculine” and “feminine” traits, dispositions and behaviors they might have. A full degendering of family life would mean that norms around family roles would be connected to parenthood rather than to specific gender roles. In any given heterosexual family there might well be differences in the extent to which the father or mother took on particular responsibilities as a result of differences in dispositions, preferences, and contingent constraints, but there would be no normatively backed expectations about who should do what. This does not imply that there would be no correlation between a person’s sex and their social roles. For example, for biological reasons it is inherently easier for a single woman to become a mother than it is for a single man to become a father, and as a result there will almost certainly be more women who are active parents than men even in the absence of gender-coercive norms. But again, this correlation between sex and roles would not be backed by normative sanctions. One final point on the idea of genderlessness: In the case of struggles for racial justice the point is often made that even if the ultimate goal is the dissolution of race as a salient social category, this does not imply that public policies in a world of racial discrimination should themselves be “race-blind”. It may take affirmative action now to move us towards a world in which race becomes irrelevant. The same is true for gender: it may take gendered policies now to combat gender-enforcing practices and thus move in the direction of genderlessness. Gender roles amplify differences in biological dispositions Among both biological males and females there is a distribution of masculine and feminine dispositions, preferences and behaviors. As I will use A r g u i ng a bo u t j u s t i c e 406 the terms, behavior refers to what people do and preferences refer to what people consciously want. Dispositions include unconscious psychological processes which affect preferences and behaviors. Preferences typically closely correspond to dispositions, but this is not always the case. What is sometimes called “consciousness raising” is precisely concerned with changing preferences in ways that potentially enable people to change their dispositions. Assertiveness training in the women’s movement, for example, would be an example where a preference to be more assertive precedes a change in the unconscious disposition to act in an assertive manner in certain kinds of social contexts. In a society with strongly gendered norms of behavior it is impossible to know exactly how underlying masculine and feminine dispositions vary among biological males and females. What we observe are behaviors: for example, women tend to behave, on average, in more nurturant ways than do men; men behave, on average, in more competitive and aggressive ways than do women. But since behaviors are simultaneously shaped by the interactions of dispositions, preferences and norms, it is impossible on the basis of the behaviors alone to infer how different are the distributions of the dispositions themselves between men and women.4 What we can say with near certainty is that in a world in which gendered norms are strong, there will be larger observed differences in the modal behaviors and preferences of men and women than in a world in which gender norms are weak. Figure 1 illustrates this idea for one particularly salient gender norm and disposition: nurturance. 4 There is also a further, deeper complication: growing up in a world with strong and consistent norms around gender affects the underlying dispositions, not just preferences and behaviors. Dispositions are not pure pre-social biological facts, but are themselves the product of the interaction of biological processes with social processes. There are thus five terms in play here: genetically-rooted biological facts that affect such things as hormones and neurological structures; dispositions; gendered preferences; gendered behaviors; and socially-enforced gender norms. These additional complexities, however, do not alter the basic point here that there are large variations among men and among women in masculine/feminine dispositions. W r i gh t – I n d e f e ns e o f g e n d e r l e ss n es s 407 Fig. 1: Male and Female distributions of nurturance dispositions and behaviors under strong gender norms and degendered norms There are four basic ideas in this figure. First, in a world with strong gendered norms around nurturance there will be a bigger difference between men and women in the distributions of nurturance behaviors (graph B) than in the distributions of nurturance dispositions (graph A), and the distributions will be more peaked around the modal behavior. A significant number of people conform to a given norm not because of its A r g u i ng a bo u t j u s t i c e 408 correspondence to their dispositions, but simply to avoid the sanctions of deviation. Second, even in a world with strong gendered norms around nurturance, there are men who are more nurturant than the average woman, and women who are less nurturant than the average man. This is especially true for the distribution of dispositions, but it will also be true for behaviors. Third, in a world with degendered norms, the distributions of both nurturance dispositions and behaviors for men and for women (graphs C and D) much more strongly overlap than in the world with strongly gendered norms (Graphs A and B). I have drawn these distributions as still having slightly different peaks on the assumption that there is likely to be at least some difference in nurturance dispositions linked to underlying biological mechanisms, but this gap could be quite small. Finally, if we assume that in a degendered social world there will be strong positive norms about the general desirability of nurturance for everyone, then it would be expected that the distribution of nurturance behaviors will move to the right for both men and women (i.e. on average people might have less nurturant dispositions than behaviors). This, of course, is not a logical necessity: a degendered world could be one in which current masculine models were generalized to all people. My expectation, however, is that the social processes which push for egalitarian ideals are likely also to embrace caregiving values. These graphs are not based on actual data and thus they should be regarded as hypotheses. They have also been drawn in what may be an exaggerated way in order to highlight the central ideas. The key point is that in a world with degendered nurturance norms – a world in which there was no normative expectation at all that women should engage in nurturance behavior more readily than men – the degree of overlap of male and female distributions for both dispositions and behaviors should be much greater than in a world with strong gender norms. Back to the problem of equality and gender We are now ready to address the question of whether the goal of egalitarians with respect to the problem of gender should be framed as gender equality or genderlessness. The aspiration for “gender equality” imagines a world in which gender norms remain effectively enforced – a world in which there are normatively backed expectations about the roles and characteristics of men and women – and yet in which it is also the case that the probability of having access to the necessary social and material W r i gh t – I n d e f e ns e o f g e n d e r l e ss n es s 409 means to live a flourishing life would be the same for men as for women.5 This implies that the potential inequality effects of the normatively enforced gender role differentiation can be neutralized through various institutional devices. The aspiration for genderlessness, in contrast, is for the dissolution of normatively backed gender differentiation in social roles. My basic thesis in what follows is that while promoting gender equality moves us in the direction of egalitarian ideals, ultimately these ideals involve the dissolution of gender. I will make two arguments. The first focuses on the dynamic effects of policies that promote gender equality: policies which effectively neutralize the inegalitarian effects of the gender relations will also tend to undermine the norms which reproduce those relations. In the long term, therefore, serious gender egalitarian policies will also undermine gender. The second argument focuses on the ways gender norms, because of their coercive quality, directly constitute obstacles to human flourishing for many men and women. There are three especially important ways in developed capitalist societies in which normatively enforced gender differentiation contributes to gender inequality in access to the conditions of flourishing: the care penalty in labor markets; gender discrimination in workplaces, especially around job promotions; and the gendered caregiving division of labor within the family. For each of these there is an array of institutional proposals for promoting gender equality.6