Plastic Pops
Originally uploaded by Jay Sennett

This cartoon was in the final rounds of my book Self-Organizing Men but ultimately got cut.

The basis of this cartoon required some understanding both of the environmental impact of endocrine-disrupting chemicals as well as a belief that science is as socially-constructed. I thought at the time that most american readers wouldn’t grasp the finer points of this cartoon.

I’ve found that folks who handily declare that gender is socially constructed come up short when it comes to science. Klew phone. Scientific knowledge can and does change over time.

Don’t believe me? How about Ptolemy? Galileo’s house arrest for daring to undermine the Ptolemaic worldview? Newton? Einstein? Quantum Mechanics?

Einstein himself thought quantum mechanics a load of crap. “God doesn’t play dice with the Universe.” In fact, god probably does play dice, alot.

So how is that biology is exempt from the same changes, heresies and disruptions as other branches of science? And why are we so invested in locating gender in our biology? Intertwined with these questions is another one: why does stating that gender can be self-determined act astonish and frighten some people?

A while back I spent some time chatting with a new FtM. You know, one of the ones with less than a year’s time on hormones.

So I’m sitting in my chair, clicking off in my head all the physical changes he’s showing, and he’s talking about how hard everything is, and people don’t understand, and it’s bad, bad, bad. Then he riffs for awhile on the LGBT panel circuit gig. How much that sucks, what with no pay and all. And I’m thinking about all the babes who are now drawn to him as he transitions, etc., the ones that stand near him at events, etc. The one’s I’ve seen touch him, and fawn over him, etc.

“I agree with you about panels,” I shared and then BOOM! Right between the ears, I realize:

I was just like that, about seven or ten years ago.

I used to talk about how hard it was, especially to some hot babe, then bask in her glow as she said something like, “oh, that is so hard!” and snuggled up next to me, (where her breast might rub against my arm) or hugged me (where both her breasts might touch my chest) or touched my face (where, depending on her top, I might get a freebie peek at her cleavage).

So this realization begins to permeate my core, and then BOOM! I realize I used panel discussions to get dates. In fact, I used the whole -transitioning-is-hard-maybe-no-one-will-date-me-life-is-hard schtick on the LGBT panel circuit to get dates.

Not in any thoughtful way, mind you. But as I listened to this guy go on, I just saw myself, seven, ten years ago, using a combination of self-fetishization and pity to get the babes to date me. I thought:

What a dorky approach! How obvious!

It worked though. At least then it did, and if the babes flocking to this guy reflect today’s times, it seems to be working still.

Then I just started laughing inside myself.

Of course, I will probably be killed in people’s heads for claiming that gender is branding.

But gender = label = brand.

I thought of this equation as I pondered an unfortunate cover piece in Newsweek.

Very little is known about the first woman to become a suicide bomber for Al Qaeda in Iraq, except that she dressed as a man.

And it goes downhill from this opening statement.

The subtextual vibe: women are in thrall of strong, persuasive men. They get duped.

Getting duped is part of the brand expectation for women, right? The guys that blew up the WTC and Pentagon were never duped. Crazy. Check. Extremist. Of course. But the press, I don’t think, claimed they were in the thrall of Osama Bin Laden.

Brand Man = Active.

Brand Woman = Passive.

Brand America = Can’t figure out this whole gender thing to begin with, and then those entralled, controlled vessels of Muslim feminity dress like men! To blow some shit up!

Thank the goddess Newsweek editors had the sense to include a sidebar by the always illuminating Lorraine Ali.

If I’d never known a Muslim woman, I’d probably pity any female born into Islam. In America we’ve come to see these women as timid creatures, covered from head to toe, who scurry rather than walk. They have no voices, no rights and no place outside the home. But I grew up around secular Muslims (my father was an Iraqi Shiite) in Los Angeles, stayed with ultrareligious relatives in Baghdad and met dozens more Muslim women on travels through the Middle East.

Her even-handed, lived experience can’t counter balance Christopher Dickey’s vibe of Muslim women (and women in general) as a brand of creatures utter lacking in will. I guess this is why the donning of men’s clothes to achieve an albeit heinous end baffles him.

People flip out when their brand expectations get thwarted. In the same way, I think, that we flip out if our iPods (a brand known for being cool and elegant) were to suddenly look like the old chunky cell phones, some of us flip out when gender, _the_ original, reliable, fixed, brand comes out with a new, improved, or different version, offering new product placement opportunities in our minds.

Some of us don’t know what to do with Gender v.3456543. Some of us think that words actually describe the thing referenced. Labels are somehow real. But women wear men’s clothes! To blow some shit up!

And we don’t know what to do with that one. Brand/Label – Thing relationship remains one of our most enduring quandries. Alfred Korzybski, the father of General Semantics, said, “The map is not the territory.”

Gregory Bateson, in “Form, Substance and Difference,” from Steps to an Ecology of Mind (ISBN 0226039056), elucidates the essential impossibility of knowing what the territory is, as any understanding of it is based on some representation:

We say the map is different from the territory. But what is the territory? Operationally, somebody went out with a retina or a measuring stick and made representations which were then put on paper. What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the retinal representation of the man who made the map; and as you push the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps. The territory never gets in at all. […] Always, the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps, ad infinitum.” (via wikipedia)

The issue of women blowing up themselves and others to achieve their goals is about behavior. The same thing for men doing the same thing.

The problem is that some of us believe we are the labels and brands. We’re buying what we’re selling, then get mad, confused, baffled and pissed when people act like the human beings we are. Shocking!

I think I’ve had this whole transsexual thing ass backwards.

Then: I used medical strategies to manipulate my body to get into my masculinity.

Now: I used my masculinity, and the medical strategies associated with achieving the kind of masculinity I want, to get into my body.

The former creates the drama of the no-penised man. The latter offers compassion and an ever-increasing push to breathe in the present moment.

Subtle, yes. But reversing the focus creates healthier bodies, I think, which, in turn, creates healthier genders. So maybe a new purpose for gender is to help us become more present to our own bodies.

How do other people use their genders to get into their bodies?

Oh! The pain.