In vision (3) - male bodies, female clothes.

First of all, the title needs some qualifying. The adjectives "male" and "female" above refer to the usual cultural understanding of these terms – which is not necessarily correct, however. Or at least not always correct.

Take clothing, for instance: If someone (e.g. Michael below) refuses the gendering of clothing, then their "female" clothes effectively cease to be female. They are merely clothes which the local culture and history regard as female. Morphology (i.e. the body) might seem more straightforward, but if the person (e.g. Alex below) inhabiting a "male" body is not in fact male, what sex is their body then?

The important point is that the maleness and femaleness of things, such as clothing or bodies, is not a constant but depends on context. That which one person regards as female, say, may not be seen as such by someone else. They may regard it as male (opposite), or androgynous (either), or non-binary (neither), or not gendered at all (not applicable).

With that out of the way, for the purpose of this post all the pictures below show "female" clothing on "male" bodies.
___________________________________________________

In a post (which I've quoted before) on his own blog, Andrew O'Neill writes: “I think I have a hardwired notion that it is desirable to be a girl. I also have over the years accepted and internalised the fact that I cannot be a girl. Therefore it is desirable to be like a girl, and because of our hugely gendered clothing split, the easiest way to achieve that is to wear the clothes of a girl. If I looked more feminine, I think I would probably act a lot more feminine, but as I don’t want to try and fail to pass for female, I ground what I do in an acknowledgement that I am male. The identity I project outwards is therefore feminine male, rather than woman. I want to dress as ME, not as something I am not.”

“I want to dress as me, not as something I am not” – I can certainly relate to that. And as a fellow transvestite, these are the questions I find persistent: Why does "feminine" presentation necessitate a female-looking morphology? Why aren't male-looking bodies sufficient?

Having just asked those questions, I don't intend to try and answer them right now, if indeed they can be answered. Ultimately, these are personal questions requiring individual and personal answers. Nevertheless, I'd like to suggest that the answers “it doesn't” and “they are” at least be considered as possibilities. To that end I'm going to show a few pictures of "female" clothes looking good on a "male" frame. The four "models" (Michael, Jasper, Andrew, Alex) identify quite differently – respectively, across the spectrum: freestyler, femme, transvestite, trans-female – but that's not actually relevant here. What is, is that all have developed a personal style that expresses who they are in an attractive and (potentially) inspiring way.

Have a look at the following photos and see what you think:


Michael




Jasper




Andrew




Alex



___________________________________________________

My thanks to Alex Drummond, Jasper Gregory, Andrew O'Neill and Michael Spookshow for permission (last November) to use their photographs.

Further material: Andrej Pejic, Liu Xianping, Stas Fedyanin. Either Andrej (who featured in ‘In vision (2)’) or Stas would have been an obvious choice for this post, but rather too obvious. We can't all look like supermodels. (And anyway, Andrej would look good in a bin liner.) The point is for us to look good with what we have, or, at the very least, make ourselves feel good – this, after all, being the real function of fashion.

Second Anniversary.

So, I got the day right this time and I've now been blogging for two years. Slightly fewer posts in the second year than in the first, but I'm keeping up with posting something every calendar month. Anyway, it's quality not quantity that counts, isn't it.

Looking at the stats again: The most viewed post is now ‘Sissies, Trannies, and Jeffreys’ (my critique of part of Sheila Jeffreys' book ‘Beauty and Misogyny’) which currently has over 1300 hits. The links thereto from Helen Boyd, Clarissa, and Ozy Frantz have helped I'm sure. Thanks to them for those, and especially to Helen for reading the piece through and suggesting an alteration in the penultimate paragraph.

More stats: Monthly pageviews peaked at 1747 in January, due to an influx of traffic from somewhere on Facebook to my second ‘what is femme?’ post. Presumably somebody likes Elizabeth Marston's definition quoted therein and has linked to it (annoyingly, I can't find out where). Other than that, it's been steadily over the 1000 mark since last March, even if the number of followers refuses to rise (which is also kind of annoying). The USA leads by Countries, approaching 10000 hits, with the UK in second place on about half that; then Canada, Australia and Germany. The highest referrer is still Google, followed by T-Central, and now Reddit has popped in ahead of Samantha.

My own favourite post this year was probably the Jeffreys one, because it took so long to write – and it's very well written, too, I think :) – though I like ‘More on "women's" clothes’ as well (the sequel to ‘Femme clothes, women's clothes’). Others, such as ‘Eight Questions’ (which I'm in process of revising for Our Different Journey) and the self-castigating ‘14th August 2012’, have been partly superseded by events, since I finally came out to my mother and sister a few weeks ago...

David Bowie released a new single and had an old Ziggy Stardust picture in the paper, and a conversation with my mother got on to gender, and I finally said something like “I'm a transvestite – you knew that, right?”. And no, she'd had no idea. My sister (who I let my mother tell when visiting two days later) had some idea – she'd seen a pair of size 14 jeans and all my books – but nothing exactly clear either. Bizarre! I'd thought the evidence was both blatant and conclusive. Apparently not. Anyway, they were both supportive, and interested (reading my blog from start to finish), and not at all judgmental. I felt exposed and vulnerable for a few days, but that was about it really. The things we worry about, eh?

Once again, my thanks to anyone who's read anything I've written, and especially to everyone who's taken the trouble to comment.

Here's to Year Three :)

Terre Thaemlitz.

Last Saturday I was in the Tanks at Tate Modern for ‘Gender Talents’. From the preliminary blurb:

Gender Talents: A Special Address, convened by Carlos Motta, presents an international group of thinkers, activists, and artists in a symposium that uses the proposition or manifesto as a structuring device and starting point for discussion. These ‘special addresses’ will explore models and strategies that transform the ways in which society perversely defines and regulates bodies. The event seeks to ask what is at stake when collapsing, inverting or abandoning the gender binary. Here the relation between self-determination and solidarity in processes of systemic change form the foundation of a pragmatic exploration of ways of being ungoverned by normative gender.

Make of that what you will – or not. It's the sort of stuff you churn out when you want arts funding (and there we were at Tate Modern after all). The event itself was more interesting. The symposiasts were (in order of appearance, double slash denoting discussion periods followed by short breaks): Carlos Motta, Esben Esther Pirelli Benestad, Del LaGrace Volcano, J. Jack Halberstam // Dean Spade (by video), Terre Thaemlitz, Beatriz Preciado // Giuseppe Campuzano, Xabier Arakistain, Campbell X, and Wu Tsang & Safra Project. (Follow the link in the first paragraph for brief bios.)

I'm not intending to review Gender Talents though. I've hated writing reviews since back when I had to do it regularly. Trying to think of something to say that isn't banal and derivative, even when you like what you're reviewing – in fact, especially when you like it... Instead, I just want to mention my favourite speaker of the day: Terre Thaemlitz.**

Terre runs Comatonse Recordings, which “is dedicated to the production and dissemination of non-categorical contemporary electronic music”, so I was down with him already. However, she also does a nice turn in iconoclasm, in particular debunking essentialist queer and trans narratives and their implicit hierarchies. Not from a position of superiority, denying people their (our) own truths as individuals – rather, it seems to me, from a position of inferiority: Oi, we're down here and you're stepping on us in your rush to be assimilated into the dominant culture, so consider the political consequences of what you're doing, okay? Then again, possibly that's not what he means at all. Perhaps it's best if you read what she has to say for yourself.

To that end, I'd suggest ‘Terre interviews Terre’ from October/December 2011. Here are a few snippets to get you started:

You might call me non-essentialist, non-op MTFTMTF... (...)
"Non-essentialist" (or sometimes I say "anti-essentialist") means that I reject the notion of my gender identity stemming from something natural, such as an "inner essence". ("Essentialist" refers to people who believe their gender is innate or biological, such as a belief in "being born this way".) Particularly in relation to social organizing and political issues, the downside of any essentialist argument - asking for rights because "I can't help it, I was born this way" - is that it removes all self-agency and capacity for choice around the issue at hand. (...)
"Non-op" means without having had any operations or medical procedures (you may have heard of the more common term "post-op", or "post-operative", used in reference to people who have undergone sexual reassignment surgery).
"MTF" means "Male to Female", which refers to people who deviate from an initially male-identified gender identity (conversely, "FTM" means "Female to Male"). I tend to list them in an endless cycle, "MTFTMTF...", because my self-representation is open-ended and goes back and forth.

[F]or several years now, when writing about myself I alternate gender pronouns (...). I prefer this to conventional "neutral" pronouns ("one", "they") because gender is never neutral under patriarchy. (...) By simply rotating "she" and "he", the focus remains on unresolved questions of gender identity within patriarchy, while rejecting the notion that "third-gender" pronouns offer a comfort zone or escape route (although they may for others). Also, because "he/she/he/she" rotation is disorienting and annoying to most everyone, I feel I am inviting the reader to share in the awkwardness and inconvenience I continually feel around issues of gender identification.

I do not identify as a man unless the social environment makes it absolutely necessary (such as in my passport). At the same time, this refusal to identify certainly does not mean I am "transcendent" of gender, and I would never say anything individualist like, "I'm not male or female - I'm just me". Society does not grant us that freedom. "I" am always in relation to "you", which means the potential for flexibility around my gender identifications is only as malleable or fluid as "you" will allow. This will change depending on whether "you" are a stranger, a friend, a lover, a family member, a physician, another trans-identified person, intersexed, transsexual, a government official, etc.
For example, when I am in women's clothes and say, "I am transgendered", the reaction is completely different than when I say the same thing while wearing men's clothes. When I wear women's clothes, it seems "real" to people. They seem to accept my femme appearance as part of a longer physical transition - they may imagine I will one day undergo medical transitioning. When I wear men's clothes, what I say is more likely to be heard as the word-games of a dilettante with no material connection to their notion of "true" transgendered bodies. This is the gap in which I exist.

That how you identify depends on context... absolutely!

So, yes, I'd certainly recommend reading the whole of Terre's interview with himself. And you can find more of her writings here. And if you want his music, you can buy it from her here. And there's a mix he did for Resident Advisor available here.

I could get quite used to this rotating pronouns business :)
___________________________________________________

** The text to Terre's address at Tate Modern can now be read here.

Feminist transvestites.

I spent much of last week arguing on Twitter and in online comment arenas (blogs, CiF). Most readers will probably know what that was about, but for those that don't...

It all arose from a casual (and unnecessary) jibe by Suzanne Moore (about Brazilian trans women), which quickly progressed (after Moore was challenged and took umbrage) to direct insults (from both sides), then out-and-out hate speech (from Julie Burchill in The Observer, prompting 2000+ complaints), followed by a ridiculous non-argument about "press freedom" (after Burchill's article was taken down again) – and the affair continues to rumble on.

I'm not going to link to any of that here. You can easily find it for yourself. Instead, I want to highlight a related article in The Guardian: ‘Why I'm trans … and a feminist’. The sub-headline reads: “In the light of this week's row between two prominent feminists and the trans community, we asked four trans writers to reflect on what feminism means to them”. This “trans-feminist panel” comprised Paris Lees, Jane Fae, CL Minou, and Stuart Crawford. The first three I know as prominent trans activists, but Stuart Crawford I didn't. He starts:

“I'm a transvestite, in that I often wear what are generally deemed women's clothes. I don't set out to "pass" as a woman; it's just that most people tend to assume that I am one and I'm disinclined to correct them. While often reluctant to describe myself as such, I consider myself to be a feminist.”

Stuart makes a lot of good points in his short piece – such as “There's not much that draws out violence like causing people to question their own sexuality. Misogyny, transphobia, homophobia: these things are interwoven.” and “Trans people have unique perspectives on sex and gender, and to exclude our voices from the discussion is to do feminism a disservice.” – as you can read for yourself. But it's the first three words that got me.

A lot of people are erased from these debates – trans men in particular – but transvestites (my own constituency) generally aren't even engaged. So it's very refreshing to see a fellow-traveller with the desire to talk seriously about feminism and being given the media space in which to do so.

Thanks, Stuart. And to The Guardian as well – this is the right way; please keep it up.

Desert Island Book.

I was asked recently – by the online digital label, Bitrate Audio – to select my desert island discs. (I'll assume everyone knows what that involves, but if not, see here.) For someone who likes making lists, this is always an enjoyable task. I've done it informally numerous times, choices changing over the years, or even by the day. My Bitrate Audio selection (comprising Béla Bartók, Joni Mitchell, Darren Solomon, Björk, Henry Cow, A Certain Ratio, Liza Minnelli, and Klute) can be found here, complete with a photo of me outside a bar in Amsterdam, looking completely un-femme (unless you happen to notice the shaved arms and plucked eyebrows perhaps). The tunes themselves can be played via youtube links and you should totally go and do that right now because they're all great!

Along with the eight discs, the castaway also gets to choose a luxury and a book. I requested a Bösendorfer Grand Piano and Dorothy Allison's book 'Skin: Talking About Sex, Class and Literature' (Pandora 1995).

It's not obvious why Dorothy Allison's writing should resonate with me so much. 'Skin' is a collection of autobiographical essays by a southern United States, working-class, abuse-surviving, radical, queer, feminist, activist, lesbian, femme, parent, poet and author. Comparing all that with my own given descriptors at the top of this post, I appear to have very little in common with her. Queer, feminist and femme – yes, but not in the same kind of way. In particular, my femme is very little like hers. So what is it?

I guess it's this: Allison writes with brutal, unflinching honesty. Her opinions, her thoughts, her beliefs are hard won, anchored in her life and experience. Her truths are messy and complicated, not ideologically rigid. She writes from the heart, with great humanity and great skill. She's intelligent, engaging, provocative, funny, and above all compassionate, courageous and sincere. Her voice cannot be easily dismissed.

I've already posted one extract, from 'Sex Writing, the Importance and the Difficulty', on my tumblog (which I use for such things). Here are a couple more:

My aunt Dot used to joke, “There are two or three things I know for sure, but never the same things and I'm never as sure as I'd like.” What I know for sure is that class, gender, sexual preference, and prejudice—racial, ethnic, and religious—form an intricate lattice that restricts and shapes our lives, and that resistance to hatred is not a simple act. Claiming your identity in the cauldron of hatred and resistance to hatred is infinitely complicated, and worse, almost unexplainable.
(...)
I grew up poor, hated, the victim of physical, emotional, and sexual violence, and I know that suffering does not ennoble. It destroys. To resist destruction, self-hatred, or lifelong hopelessness, we have to throw off the conditioning of being despised, the fear of becoming the they that is talked about so dismissively, to refuse lying myths and easy moralities, to see ourselves as human, flawed, and extraordinary. All of us—extraordinary.
— from 'A Question of Class'.

As feminists, many of us have committed our whole lives to struggling to change what most people in this society don't even question, and sometimes the intensity of our struggle has persuaded us that the only way to accomplish change is to make hard bargains, to give up some points and compromise on others. What this has always meant in the end, unfortunately, is trading some people for others.
I do not want to do that.
I do not want to require any other woman to do that.
I do not want to claim a safe and comfortable life for myself that is purchased at the cost of some other woman's needs or desires.
(...)
Essential political decisions are made not once, but again and again in a variety of situations, always against that pressure to compromise, to bargain. (...) Simple answers, reductionist politics, are the most prone to compromise, to saying we're addressing the essential issue and all that other stuff can slide. It is, in reality, people who slide.
— from 'Public Silence, Private Terror'.

I'm not sure whether those extracts are representative of Allison's writing or not. Read the book for yourself and decide. Read all her books. As for me, I've only today discovered that a new collection, 'Conversations with Dorothy Allison' (from 1993-2009), was published earlier this year. Damn, how did I not know about that before?! I just hope the Christmas post doesn't delay its arrival for too long.

Our Different Journey.

The Nottingham "trans-neighbours" site, which I wrote about in this post, is now active. Actually, I don't know if we are – or will be – all from Nottingham(shire). I guess it doesn't matter that much:

“Our Different Journey is a small project a group of like minded trans folk decided to put together. Our hope was that we’d collect a few life stories from our community and share them with the rest of the world. Our aim is to put faces and real stories to the subject of transgender life.”

The basis of these stories is a set of eight questions gathered and borrowed from the T-Town project of The Gender Alliance of the South Sound, Washington State, USA.

Lynn, one of ODJ's prime instigators, posted her answers on her own blog here. Mine were in my earlier post. I guess these will either be copied across or linked to at some stage (if the former, do I have to provide a picture?). The first set on the site itself is by Petra Bellejambes. I'm just going to highlight one small part of that.

Petra writes: “I have managed over the years to tease apart the threads of gender, femininity and sexuality, weave them back together evenly, and normalize the joy I find in the discovery of the whole me.”

Ah, very nicely put! There's a whole world of meaning lurking behind that single sentence. It literally stops me in my tracks to take a breath.

If this is anything to go by, ODJ looks like being a very worthwhile enterprise indeed.

Laurie Penny's masculinity survey.

In the introduction to her 1998 collection, 'A Fragile Union', Joan Nestle writes:

With this book, I offer you the fragile unions that are my life – the life of a fifty-eight-year-old white Jewish fem lesbian woman with cancer living in New York City in the United States of America at the end of the twentieth century. I give you these details not as markers of identity the way we often did in the lesbian-feminist movement of the 1970s and '80s, thinking that if we laid out our particulars, we had cleared away all ambiguity about our lives, but precisely for the opposite reason. Each of the listed elements represents huge worlds of shifting meaning, unending searches for what can keep my love and what has to be let go.

I agree with the sentiment; such words cannot and do not define us. Nevertheless, they do offer an indication of our history, the forces and experiences which forged us, the intersections of our privileges and oppressions. It is to that end I offer my own fragile unions: a forty-eight-year-old white femme queer straight man of middle-class Christian upbringing living in Nottinghamshire in England at the start of the twenty-first century. The reason: to provide context, however limited, for the rest of this post.
___________________________________________________

Feminist activist and author, Laurie Penny, has recently become interested in men – in particular, in how sex, gender, sexuality and feminism affect men. See, for example, this piece in The Independent back in April. QRG massive have had some disparaging remarks to make about all that (see here), but I haven't mentioned this in order to get involved in that argument myself. It's just another preamble to the real purpose of this post.
___________________________________________________

Last weekend (6th/7th October) Penny tweeted (@PennyRed) about a survey she was conducting, prompted by the publication and subsequent discussion of 'The End of Men' by US journalist, Hanna Rosin. “So chaps, if I were to do another totally-unscientific questionnaire about the male experience like I did a few months ago, who would play?” and “For clarification: the survey is for anyone who identifies as male, OR who was raised as a male.”

Because I was one of the men who responded, because I spent a little time on her questions, and because I don't like to see my work vanish into the oblivion of cyberspace, I thought I'd post my answers up here.

So perhaps the point of my first preamble now becomes clear. In responding to this survey as a man, I respond as one man. I do not speak for "men", nor for other men "like me". I respond from my own experience and from my own history, which my preamble very briefly summarizes. And thus I contribute my own small individual part to the sum of all men's stories, each of which is equally valid and significant. And the conclusions that, in my opinion, can be drawn about men from the sum of these stories are — nothing.

But here are my answers anyway (for posterity if you like), each preceded by Penny's questions in bold – there are 28 of them.
___________________________________________________

How old are you, where did you grow up and go to school, and what do you do now?
48; Stockport and Nottingham (mostly Nottingham); editor.

Do you think that it's the 'End of Men' - is traditional masculinity at an end? And is that a good thing or a bad thing?
The title is silly. But if an end to "traditional masculinity" means an end to enforced gender roles for men (and for everybody) then that would be a very good thing.

Do you think there is a 'crisis in masculinity?' Has this got worse with the recession and the loss of traditional employment?
No. I think this is a 'problem' largely imagined by sociologists. In my experience, men mostly just get on with stuff.

What are the biggest problems men face today?
For men as a group, in England, right now... I can't think of any offhand. Unless the coalition reinstates conscription or something.

How important is your gender identity to you?
Very. But my gender identity is queer (and femme), not stereotypically masculine, so I think about this stuff a lot.

How does sex affect your experience of being a man?
Errm, not at all. I think it's more the other way round: that as a man I might be expected to fulfil a particular sexual role, a role that I'm not interested in fulfilling.

When do you feel most vulnerable as a man?
When I'm out late at night by myself in an unsafe district. Or when my appearance is overtly un-masculine. But this is vulnerability as a person (and fear of violence) rather than specifically as a man.

Do you worry about being judged by women? How, and in what way?
Not especially. I can only think of one instance where it ever worries me a bit: I have a personal interest in female presentation, so I tend to look at women quite a lot, to see how women dress and present themselves. (Men, too, but men mostly aren't sartorially very interesting.) Sometimes, therefore, I worry about my looking being mistaken for oppressive behaviour. I need a big sign that says: "I'm looking at your clothes not your body. No, really!"

If you could change one thing about being a man, what would it be?
About being a man: nothing. About being a man in society: an end to all gender stereotypes.

Tell me what being a boy meant to you as you grew up (if relevant).
Only that I wasn't "allowed" to like or do certain "girls' things". I did them anyway, but with various degrees of secrecy.

What, in your opinion, does 'being a man' mean in this society, and how has that changed over the past two generations?
To me, it means nothing at all. I don't accept any limits on human characteristics, personality, behaviour, etc on account of binary sex. How things have changed is that there's perhaps more gender freedom than before, though not enough for my liking.

Time for the opposite question: what does 'being a woman' mean? How do you think things have changed for women over the past two generations?
Again, it means nothing to me. As for change: feminism has made a lot of gains over the past two (and more) generations, but again not enough.

Do you feel pressure to conform to social expectations of masculinity? From whom, and what does that mean?
Pressure, yes, from society at large. But this is because I tend towards gender non-conformity, rather than just being masculine.

Are you a feminist? What can feminism do for men, and what can men do for feminism?
Yes. By breaking down gender barriers for women, I see feminism as consequently breaking down gender barriers for everyone (including men). Men can support feminist issues (where we agree with them), behave in a non-sexist way (why wouldn't you?!), and criticize other men's sexist behaviour.

What aspects of the male experience do you think are least understood by women and by society at large? What do you wish more people knew about men?
Nothing in particular. The only time this arises is when people (women or anybody) make assumptions about men because of gender. Oi! Stop that! Men are not all the same.

How did you feel about women as a young man? Did you have close female friends or siblings?
I'm primarily heterosexual, so this was a significant factor for me as a young man (if by young you mean adolescent). Female friends: one or two. Siblings: one sister.

What do you feel about women now? How do you relate to them?
How I feel depends on the individual woman. Otherwise I mostly relate to people as people.

What about women as sexual/romantic partners (if relevant) - what role does that sort of relationship play in your life?
I'm attracted to gender non-conformity, in particular to deliberate female masculinity (the cultural ubiquity of female femininity makes me tired). At the moment: no relationship.

Have you ever been sexist? In what way? Has the way you treat women changed?
Probably, though I can't think of anything right now. The way I treat people has perhaps changed as I've grown older.

What about sexual consent? Why do you think rape and sexual violence are so endemic in our society?
Consent is paramount. Because people can be bastards. As for rape and sexual violence by men towards women: because our sexist and heteronormative culture defines male sexual aggression and entitlement as normal.

What's your relationship to porn? Do you think it has affected the way you behave sexually?
I don't have a relationship to porn. The majority of porn seems to be visual and promotes a form of sexuality to which I don't personally relate; e.g. it presents sexually available naked women and I'm supposed to want to do stuff to them. My sexuality doesn't work like that. Also, I'm more aroused by language than imagery.

When do you feel most 'masculine' and why? What things that you do make you feel masculine?
I had to think about this one. I suppose anything that involves physical strength makes me feel sort of masculine. This is a cultural product of course: men are stronger than women on average, and our culture assumes a correlation between men, masculinity and strength. For instance, I felt sort of masculine recently when shifting a large sofa about, which other people were struggling with.

Do you ever worry about being misunderstood or misinterpreted because of your gender? When and why?
I don't really worry about it. But when it happens – when people make any assumptions about me because I'm a man – I tend to get cross.

Do men experience sexism? In what way? Can you give examples from your own life?
Certainly. When men are assumed to do (or not do) or be (or not be) or think anything specific because of gender. (In that regard, some feminists can be outrageously sexist.) But mostly this is just an annoyance; it doesn't have that many definite consequences on my own life. Or to put it another way, I can mostly count on male privilege when I want it.

How does race affect your experience of gender?
As a white man in England, not much.

How does your job (or lack of a job, if you are sick or out of work) affect how you experience your own gender?
My job – editing – is culturally fairly gender neutral, so it doesn't affect my experience of gender. Especially as I work from home, so there's no work environment.

How do you think knowing a woman will be the one reading these questions has affected your replies?
Not at all.

And finally - What have I left off this survey that I should have asked? Is there anything else you want to talk about?
No, there's nothing else for me right now.

Gender – a fem(me)inist position.

In simple webspeak, THIS:

There's no question that sex-role conditioning in our male-dominated society is one of the primary means by which women's oppression is perpetrated. Gender systems (which sex roles express), however, are not intrinsically oppressive. What is oppressive in our society is the linking of biological sex (female or male) to gender identity (woman or man), gender or sex role (feminine or masculine), sexual object choice (opposite), and sexual identity (heterosexual). Barbara Ponse calls these correlations “the principle of consistency.” It is this system, and the denial of any other construction of gender, on which sexism is founded. The problem is the correlations, not the specific components.

What's oppressive about gender, defined sex roles, in our society is that they are limited to two, rigidly correlated with biological sex, and obsolete, in a complex industrial society, as an expression of who does what work. The sex-role oppression that feminism means to criticize is rooted in the social restriction, the male=aggressive=breadwinner and female=passive= housewife model of heterosexuality; traditional heterosexual sex-roles are but symptoms of that restriction. Gender per se is not the problem, and I think it impossible, as well as pointless, to try to rid ourselves of it.

— Lyndall MacCowan in Re-collecting history, renaming lives: Femme stigma and the feminist seventies and eighties; from 'The Persistent Desire' (ed. Joan Nestle; Alyson Publications 1992).