Having transitioned genders and lived under two hormonal paradigms (testosterone dominant and estrogen dominant), I actually am a stronger believer in the inherent differences between biological men and women than I was before I transitioned. Testosterone made me much more aggressive and assertive. I was much more interested in sports, and I was more sexually dominant. Estrogen has made me much more passive and congenial, and I am more sexually submissive. I can see the difference very starkly when I switch up my hormonal medications now as well.
I suppose that most people think that trans people are here to demolish gender and create this sexless environment, but that has been far from my personal experience. I think that hormonal differences can program people to be more effective in certain jobs, and so it is unlikely that certain jobs will ever have perfect gender parity. Honestly, I see the sexes as an evolutionary adaptation that allowed for specialization of labor in order to maximize survivability in early humans. We needed certain people to specialize in being nurturers and others to specialize in being explorers and hunters.
But now technological advances have dramatically decreased the value of those specializations and normalized the difference between maleness and femaleness. We don’t need men to go out and survive the jungle to get some venison. We don’t even need men to construct things with their physical size anymore. Robots do those jobs for us now, and they will continue to take up more market share. I don’t know about the statistics, but mechanization might be replacing typically male jobs at a faster rate than typically female jobs, and this dramatic drop in the social value of maleness might be contributing to our current social freak-out.
This being said, there is still value, in my opinion, in gender specialization. I don’t foresee a totally androgynous future because certain specializations based on inherent biological/hormonal differences will provide a competitive advantage on the margins in certain situations. We need some people to be the strident, rule-breaking, transgressors and others to be nurturing, Venusian caretakers.
However, we must allow for the cross-socialization of genders for those of us who exist on the fringes of typical maleness and femaleness. Although 90% of people will probably not have issues socializing with their biological peers, others of us are very damaged by being socially deprived of our peers who might not share our genitalia but ultimately are the people we need to socialize with. This kind of social deprivation happens with minorities outside of gender minorities, and this kind of social permeability is necessary for people like myself. We need to find the balance between a certain rigidity and permeability of structures in order to allow for the greatest possible socio-psychological flourishing.
So, I’m somewhat conservative and somewhat skeptical about the coming “evaporation of gender,” so I can identify with some of the “right wing” rhetoric. And yet, technology moves forward and disrupts our value structures unabatedly.
Any thoughts?
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