Forward Into the Past!

My Diversity Manager Facebook friend shared this meme the other day.

It annoyed me enormously, because it invokes 1950s sexist stereotypes as gender norms.  I commented to that effect.  My friend said he'd been inclined to agree at first, but then realized that it was about the fact that genitals don't define gender, and said I needed to remember the context.  What?

The more I thought about the meme, the worse it became.  Let's start with the final paragraph.  It assumes that dress, hair, and other visible details define gender, and also tell me whether a person is trans or not.  This fits with the widespread tendency to treat transgender as nonconforming gender presentation rather than subjective gender identity.  That is not only erroneous but harmful, because it favors and promulgates sexist stereotyping.

Consider my Diversity Manager friend himself.  For the three decades I've known him, he has had flowing shoulder-length hair, which in Barbie-and-Ken terms means his gender is female, which tells me that he's trans. He isn't, but that's what his gender presentation says.  In the early 60s when men began wearing their hair longer, they were frequently accused of looking like women, confusing the sexes, and so on, even when that long hair was the only gender-nonconforming trait they had.  And it didn't even have to be that long: when I look at the Beatles' early albums, for example, their hair doesn't seem long at all, yet it drove gender cops mad with anxiety and fury.

Along with their hair, many men in that era began changing their clothing styles, wearing brighter colors that were taboo for males in their parents' generation; some experimented with makeup, many began to pierce their ears and wear earrings.  Before long older men also adopted some of these modes, and soon after those young men became older themselves.  Often these fashions were defended and rationalized as a rejection of restrictive traditional masculinity, though that rejection was only partial.  It frequently coexisted with a very traditional male supremacy, misogyny, and predatory male sexuality.  As Dorothy Dinnerstein recounted in her important book The Mermaid and the Minotaur (Harper, 1976):

Men could assume sweetly open, uncertain postures, carry flowers, adorn their bodies in what their society at large regarded as outrageously feminine style, and still be masculine. But women who dominated meetings by sheer lung-power, or demanded that others type their leaflets and make them coffee, would have been unsexing themselves. A roomful of male students of mine during that period, decorative and gentle-looking, charmingly tentative in their style of speech, full of aphorisms of the “Kids are beautiful” and “Where you are is where it’s at” and “Like, you know, like, I had this feeling” genre, laughed explosively at the following riddle: “Why won’t [name some plain-spoken, forthright female head of state, or congressperson, or controversial author] wear a miniskirt? Because she’s afraid her balls will show!”

This clinging to masculine status and privilege helped to fuel second-wave feminism.  Effeminate gay men are often ferociously misogynist, as are many MTF transsexuals.  In his book on sex changes, Patrick Califia documented MTF transsexuals who criticized women for not being feminine enough: womanhood, they complained, was wasted on them, and should be reserved for those who appreciated and knew how to do it properly.  More recently, I've noticed that critics of so-called TERFs (women who refuse to accept the legitimacy of transgender identities) tend to fall back on misogynist abuse that reminds me of Gamergate in its monkeys-throwing-feces abandon.  But of that, more in another post.

During the same period, women appropriated styles that had been considered male property.  Even in the 50s, when I was a kid, there was criticism of women who wore trousers.  That seems to have pretty much faded away, and women can wear skirts or trousers as they find convenient: they can even change their "gender" from day to day. Women have also taken on jobs that men had previously monopolized.  Gender reactionaries who insist on the immutability of sexual difference have to forget that the current state of gender affairs should not, on their assumptions, exist: women and men have changed their behavior and presentation in areas that were claimed to be set in stone.  Better still (in my opinion), what replaced the 1950s gender order was not a new conformity but freedom.  At the university where I worked for four decades, students now wear a variety of hairstyles, costumes, uniforms, and they don't seem to view them as mandatory for all.

Perhaps, as I've suggested before, we'll never have equal proportions of men and women in some fields; no one knows.  But the thing to remember is that in the past, we were assured that there would never be any women scientists or CEOs or rabbis, because women were biologically unsuited to those jobs; and that no men at all would attend childbirth, or do early childcare.  If we're still at, say, a 70/30 ratio of men to women in math or physics, remember that in the Good Old Days, 99/1 was defended as God-ordained and biologically inevitable.  It took considerable thought control to ignore that in fact such unicorns already existed, but the eye of faith is generally blind.  (Remember: faith means knowing what you know isn't so.)

So we can see that gender presentation does not equal gender identity, and that we can't know whether people are trans or cis by the way they dress or carry themselves.  What the Sixties produced was a rejection of that assumption.  Gender stereotypes and norms didn't disappear altogether of course, partly through cultural inertia and partly because of conscious resistance to these changes, but overall, the boundaries have been moved much farther than their defenders said they could be, and there's much more variety and freedom in gender presentation than there was in the 1950s. That's why the equation of 1950s sex stereotypes with "gender" in the meme above annoyed me so much: I think it represents a rejection of the breakdown of gender stereotypes that I and many other people welcomed.  I didn't foresee that the progress we've made would have to be defended not only against religious fascists but against people who promote those stereotypes as an advance, even as liberation.  Well, you live and learn.

More on this soon.

Does Not Nature Itself Teach You That a Woman Should Not Shave Her Pits?

This item appeared in my newsfeed this morning because my Diversity-Manager friend commented on it.  (Names, except mine, are obscured to protect the guilty.)  In a way, his ex cathedra pronouncement was predictable, and of course I myself agree that women shouldn't be required to shave their body hair, any more than they should be required to wear the hijab or cover their heads when they meet a supreme religious leader.

What messed with my mind was DMF's simplistic appeal to Natural-Law doctrine, which I don't think he'd invoke in most contexts, and certainly not with regard to transgender issues.  (He may well not have realized he was doing so: he's not the most careful thinker.)  Quite apart from the fact this doctrine is a mainstay of antifeminist, antigay and antitrans bigots -- though the Born-Gay argument also relies on it -- it can't be applied consistently to human beings.  Nor does anyone do so: I alluded to the apostle Paul's decree that "nature" teaches that women shouldn't cut their hair but men should do so.  The passage is a marvel of incoherence, which is what one usually finds when people invoke Nature for any reason, for any cause (via).  (It's fascinating to me that some arbitrary religious requirements inspire contempt, while others inspire awe, with no criteria for the difference that I can discern.)

People shouldn't be required to modify their bodies in certain ways, but cutting or shaving hair, trimming nails, covering or uncovering themselves, painting or otherwise adorning themselves, are so ubiquitous in human cultures that such practices can reasonably called "natural," though no particular modification should be mandatory.  And anyone who denounces one given modification almost certainly will favor another.  Which practices (if any) should be forbidden can only be decided by deliberation and judgment, not by appeals to Nature or any other fixed rule. 

Which of These Things Is Not Like the Others?

Voters in Houston have overwhelmingly rejected a city law that prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity -- along with race, sex, color, religion, and other characteristics already protected by federal civil rights law but not by local ordinance. The law had been passed by the Houston City Council in 2014.  Today in the e-mail I got a press release from the National LBGTQ Task Force Action Fund, which referred to

the city’s ordinance that extends non-discrimination protections to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people--among 13 other protected classes including race, religion, sex, color, age, ethnicity, disability, national origin, marital status, military status, genetic information, pregnancy, and family status.

There's something off here.  I looked it up, and found that, sure enough, the ordinance prohibits discrimination based on "sexual orientation" and "gender identity," along with 13 other traits.  It doesn't specify lesbians, gay men, or the rest, which would have laid the law open to legal challenge.

I confess that some of the confusion was in my own mind.  I gather that "protected class" does not refer to a group of individuals -- it's legalese for the protected characteristic, but in neutral terms: "race," not "African-Americans"; "sex", not "women."  But the related "protected group" is confusing too.  Wikipedia, in a very brief article, says it "is a group of people qualified for special protection by a law, policy, or similar authority... U.S. federal law protects employees from discrimination or harassment based on sex, race, age, disability, color, creed, national origin or religion."  My point is that "sex, race, age, etc." don't refer to groups, but to all individuals.  A law prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation protects heterosexuals as well as homosexuals and bisexuals; a law prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity will protect cisgender as well as transgender individuals; and so on.  I've said before that I don't know what sort of discrimination cisgender individuals might face, but someone's bound to figure out a way to do it before long.  That's one of the generally-ignored pitfalls (or is it a pitfall?) of civil rights antidiscrimination law: it protects majorities as well as well as minorities.  White men have sought and found relief under existing civil rights legislation, as have heterosexuals and bisexuals who were discriminated against by gay men.  And Christians, despite the whining of some of them, are already (in) a protected class. 

In this respect civil rights law is at odds with the dominant multiculti discourse on (for example) racism, which defines racism solely as structural racism and declares dogmatically that white people cannot suffer from racism.  Perhaps not -- it's evidently a matter of definition -- but they (we) can certainly experience discrimination based on our race.  It's written into the law, though as with many laws the consequences may not have been foreseen.  (Remember the article I discussed a couple of months ago, which treated racism as a consequence of innate human tendencies to stereotype people by their appearance, and declared that all white people are racist.  It also conflicted with the dominant multicultural model in treating racism as a matter of individual prejudice rather than structural factors, but neglected to notice that it also proved that all people of color are racist, since they have the same innate stereotyping tendencies.  When I pointed this out to the diversity manager who'd posted the article on Facebook, he floundered: he hadn't noticed the problem, and still didn't get it, caught as he is in the toils of diversity-management / culture of therapy discourse.  That couldn't be what the article meant, because it couldn't be.  That's the big trouble with diversity management in institutions, whether schools or corporations: people are given authority over others even though they don't really know what they're talking about.  But not to worry, they're just following the orders of their DNA.)

I understand why the Task Force phrased their press release as they did; it's a long-established convention to refer to civil rights laws in terms of the minorities they were enacted to protect, so that many people have come to believe that "Civil Rights" means specifically the rights of black people.  "Gay rights" is shorthand for prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation, but many people, gay and straight, take it literally; and so on.  Since most people evidently have forgotten, if they ever knew, what the shorthand is short for, I think it's necessary to abandon the shorthand and spell out the actual meaning for a while.  Maybe it won't do much good.  Opposition to civil rights laws doesn't come from a misunderstanding of what the laws are supposed to do; bigots deliberately misunderstand the laws for their own reasons.  But it can't help that supporters of civil rights law don't undertand the laws either.

I'm Not a Racist But My Brain Is

A sidebar to the matter of biological reductionism: An old acquaintance of mine posted a link to this article today, and commented:

When I've argued that the tendencies which create biases (but not specific biases) are hardwired in us because our brains try to be efficient and use heuristics when only incomplete information is available (and complete information is never available), so elimination of this or that -ism probably isn't a likely goal to strive toward, but diminution of it's impacts is, I've encountered understandable resistance. This item does a much better job than I've done of explaining this perspective and more.

My acquaintance is now a diversity manager at a state university somewhere, so he often posts material like this, a tendency which is no doubt part of his own brain trying to be efficient.  I realize it's just his DNA talking, but my DNA felt that a few remarks were in order.

First, organisms, including human beings, are not "hardwired."  Metaphors like this aren't necessarily harmful -- metaphors are unavoidable when talking about the world -- but using a machine-based metaphor to describe organisms usually leads to confusion.  The usual defense, used by Richard Dawkins among others, is to claim that "machine" refers not to the simple metal and plastic machines Man has so far created, but to idealized machines that don't yet exist.  If people would bear these nonexistent but superior machines in mind when they encounter the "machine" metaphor, there would be no confusion.  Alas, in the real world, people seem to prefer to fall back on the machines they know when they parse this metaphor.  A hardwired machine cannot strive toward any goal, cannot transcend its programming, cannot exert any agency at all.  Human beings can, because we aren't machines in the sense that a Cuisinart or a Mercedes is.  (True, we often suspect that machines have minds of their own when they fail at inconvenient times.  The tendency to anthroporphize the inanimate is also a common, possibly innate human trait.)

Second, to move to the article, it doesn't actually use the word "hardwired," which is good.  And the research it discusses may be suggestive.  Suppose for the moment that it actually points to innate human tendencies, which seems likely to me too.  It would be just as true, in that case, to title the article "If You're Black [or Asian, or Jewish, or Native American], Science Says You're Probably a Racist," because those tendencies are more or less universal to human beings.  Not quite universal, though: according to the article, "In a 2007 study of over 2.5 million IAT [Implicit Association Test] responses, University of Virginia psychology professor Brian Nosek and colleagues reported that 68% of participants demonstrated negative implicit attitudes toward black people, dark skin, and black children. A 2010 follow-up study headed by Nosek revealed that despite the US election of its first black president, little had changed."  Why the election of the first black US president would have changed supposedly innate brain responses is not clear, but it's worth stressing that 32 percent of the participants did not demonstrate these negative responses, so not everybody's brain is racist, at least not to the same degree.  The article doesn't attempt to explain this, nor how the researchers know that the implicit associations are innate -- after all, the respondents had presumably been alive long enough to soak up social cues on skin color in a historically racist society.  I suppose they simply assumed that whatever the majority does is inborn.

There are good PR reasons why the article has the title it does, and I doubt my acquaintance would have recommended it if it had ascribed racism to people of color.  There's at least anecdotal evidence that prejudice against darker skin is widespread in populations of color, whether they are minorities (as in the US) or majorities (as in Asia, for example).  As a diversity manager, my acquaintance also works within the paradigm that defines racism not as a matter of individual bias or prejudice but a structural feature of institutions and societies.  From what I've seen, there's a strong tension in university residential counseling departments between biological determinism and cultural determinism.  Biological determinism is applied to sexual orientation, for example, while cultural determinism governs discussions of culture, prejudice and stratification.  Gender is a topic where the two tendencies would clash, but so far they're just juxtaposed and harmonized; I don't think that will last.

Third, the article shows a rather crude understanding of "race."  Race is not just a matter of skin color, or even of any visible traits at all.  Perhaps the writer simply wanted to simplify a complex issue, but it still comes out as though race were a real-world, pre-cultural quality of human beings, instead of a messy social construct full of contradictions.  So, for example, "Studies have found that the human brain shows heightened responses in sensory and emotional areas when we observe others in pain (a likely marker of empathy), but not so much when the person in pain is a different race. We literally do not feel the pain of others."  This even though the writer goes on to cite a case which proves that race is ascribed: "Last year, sociology researchers Aliya Saperstein, Andrew Penner, and Jessica Kizer published a longitudinal analysis showing that that once someone is arrested, even once, that person is more likely to be classified as black rather than white or Asian."

"Blackness," then, is not necessarily an innate trait of a person to which the observer reacts, but a classification applied by the observer for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color.  And while it does appear that "race" and "racism" as means of defining people as fully human or not are relatively recent developments, historically people have classified others as Other for all sorts of reasons, from the language they speak to the gods they worship to the land they live on.  And that leaves out body configuration, or "sex," now called "gender."  This may mean that Othering is an innate trait, but by focusing on race the article oversimplifies the issues involved, by implying that "race" is the paradigm case of difference that inspires bias.

Finally, the article uses another problematic metaphor, that of a radical dualism in the human self:  "Our brains love to form and use stereotypes," even though "we want not to be racist."  Our brains do the wanting, after all, and it's arguable that "we" do want to be racist, thanks to the stereotyping mechanisms that Science has found according to the article, and depending on what you think "we" refers to.  Wanting not to be racist is also the product of tendencies in the brain, such as wanting not to be shamed in our communities.  Apparently the "bad," disapproved parts of ourselves are Othered by blaming them on our brains and our genes, while the "good," approved parts float free, struggling against the baser impulses of our biology.  It was my diversity-manager acquaintance whom I told, when he was a student at IU, that I'd love not to believe in Free Will, but unfortunately my genes programmed my brain to believe in it, and so I can't help myself.  It can be useful for some purposes, and certainly it's easy, to divide oneself into "I" and "me," Brother Spirit and Brother Ass.  But it's possible, and necessary, to put the pieces back together and see them as a whole, however complex and conflicted; otherwise we just chase our own tails endlessly.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Diversity

Late last semester, a display on gender balance in universities went up on the diversity-education board in the residence hall where I work. The board is the responsibility of a student who gets room, board, and a cash stipend for updating it once a month, plus organizing two educational programs each month, supervised by graduate students. All too typically for such material, it had some problems. Let's have a look.

THEN: In 1960, women received only 35 percent of bachelor's degrees. By 1980, the recipients were equally matched by sex.

NOW: For every 100 American women enrolled in college, there are only 77 men. For every 100 women who graduate with a bachelor's degree, only 73 men accomplish the same feat.

Notice that the meaning of the numbers changed between THEN and NOW, from percentage of degrees received to the proportions of men to women enrolled and graduating; that's a no-no. An incautious reader might take the latter figures to mean that women get 77 or 73 percent of bachelor's degrees nowadays. After puzzling over the numbers awhile, I did some searching and found that in 2004, women received 58 percent of the bachelor's degrees granted in the US. That's still quite an imbalance, but it doesn't sound as alarming as 73 percent. I suppose the student diversity educator looked online for the numbers and picked the first results he found; possibly he didn't notice that they weren't comparable. (Those who worry about gender balance will be relieved to hear that the god-given ratios largely persist in science and engineering.)

Also, "Over the past decade, women with a bachelor’s degree or higher jumped nearly 7 percentage points, from 19 percent to 26 percent. During the same time, men had a 4-percentage-point increase going from 25 percent to 29 percent." Men are not, in other words, being shut out of higher education; they were already overrepresented, so it's not surprising if their numbers aren't increasing as fast as women's. I hope that the next bulletin board won't be on racial divides in education, since 50% of Asian-Americans have bachelor's degrees, compared to 30 percent of non-Hispanic whites. Whites are already getting restive about Asians' academic "overachievement."

The College Board described the reasons for these numbers:
Traditional schools aren't tuned in to the hands-on learning styles of boys
The media portrayal of smart young men generally is of socially awkward boys who don't get dates to the prom
Young male students, particularly at-risk youth, lack positive male models in and out of the classroom

This is a mess. First, these "reasons" don't come from the College Board. They come from a New York Times blog post listed as a resource on the bulletin board, which also turns out to be the source for the "77 out of 100" figures. (There are three links to "Resources" on the bulletin board; I'll come to the other two presently.) Admittedly, it's not clear where the blogger got these "reasons," but it sounds like they might come from Melissa Kleiner, an assistant principal from Pittsburgh who led a College Board program on the "gender gap."

Ms. Kleiner set up a program for boys in her middle school, using frequent group sessions and field trips to examine what leadership is, and how the students can assume leadership roles ... [including] a ropes course in the Pennsylvania woods (during class time, to which other teachers might object) or watching a montage of clips from movies like “Gladiator” or “Saving Private Ryan.” But the film clips, in their own way, show men leading other men, which, Ms. Kleiner hopes will motivate her students to find leadership and success in their own lives.

No mention in the article about the effectiveness of this program, which appears to have been inspired by the 1990s' mythopoetic men's movement. That movement and its media stars, especially people like Robert Bly and Michael Gurian, spread the alarmist myths about boys and school that this Times blog post now retails. But those myths are bogus, because schools have never been "boy friendly," and most boys have always been hostile to academic achievement, often picking on the "grinds" who studied hard. If men used to get most bachelor's degrees, it was because they didn't have to "compete" with women for them. (Incidentally, there's no reason why competition should come into it, but that is how the situation is commonly viewed.) Women were blocked from access to higher education until well into the twentieth century, and as soon as the barriers were lowered, they surged in to take advantage of opportunities that, comparatively speaking, most men had never been very interested in.

Concern about boys' achievement appears to be a worldwide phenomenon, and not just in English-speaking countries. It's also quite old. (I don't have any links for this; those who want to know more might look at Failing Boys: Issues in Gender and Achievement, ed. Debbie Epstein et al. [Open University, 1998]; Masculinity Goes to School, Rob Gilbert and Pam Gilbert [Routledge, 1998]; and the writings of R. W. Connell and Michael Kimmel. Though these books, except for Kimmel's, focus on England and Australia, they address American controversies too.)

Back to the bulletin board:

FACTS:
The federal gender-equity law known as Title IX prohibits colleges and universities from discriminating against applicants based on gender.

Just a nitpick here: Title IX prohibits discrimination based on sex, not gender. True, "gender" has replaced "sex" in diversity-speak, probably because "sex" might be taken to refer to copulation. But "sex" is the word used in the law, and the board had already referred to the proportion of degrees being "matched by sex" in 1980.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has begun examining whether selective colleges are discriminating against women in undergraduate admissions, as the rapidly growing proportion of female applicants threatens gender balance on those campuses.

Whoa! If you weren't paying attention, you might easily miss the fact that discrimination against women is the worry here, since it's women who "threaten" gender balance. It's at this point that the other Resources might be useful, but they are both to articles from the Chronicle of Higher Education that are available online only to subscribers. Happily, though, the rest of us can read a newer article from the Chronicle that gives an update. One commenter to this article remarks, "It's awesome how affirmative action never applies to men." Actually, it does -- I've seen numerous arguments over the past decade that affirmative action should be applied to males in school. Which brings me to the bulletin board's pop quiz:

QUESTIONS: Are selective coeducational institutions, both private and public, giving undue preference to male applicants to avoid becoming "too female"?

This first question can't really be answered on the basis of the information on the bulletin board; it's what the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights is just now beginning to investigate, though the Chronicle article I linked above mentions "reports in the news media several years ago that [the University of Richmond] was intentionally admitting a disproportionately high number of male applicants" -- but even those reports don't seem to be substantiated. I've often noticed, in contexts like this, that people are asked about matters of fact as though they were matters of opinion.

Should universities be allowed to consider gender and accept higher proportions of men to balance the scales?

Well, universities use a number of criteria in admissions; representation is always consciously designed and constructed. If it can be shown that the value of a 50/50 gender balance in the student body outweighs the desirability of achievement and ability, then it might be acceptable to increase the number of males on campus. But it has not been shown. Arguments for doing so include the promotion of heterosexual dating and marriage on campus, which never seemed to concern the opponents of coeducation in the past. It's not clear that college students necessarily should be getting married before they graduate -- what's the rush? Aside from this, the arguments seem to rely on an assumption that male students aren't doing as well as female students because of anti-male discrimination, which hasn't been proven either. What "scales" are to be "balanced" here?

Should colleges simply ignore this trend because of past wrongdoings with regards to gender?

Now we come to the anti-affirmative action propaganda. We haven't been given any reason to believe that women are getting more bachelor's degrees than men nowadays because of unfair advantages given to women to redress "past wrongdoings with regards to gender". That's what this question assumes, though. What appears to be happening is that women's academic achievement and success outstrips that of men, when barriers are removed. (It's revealing that there are references in some of the discussion to "overachieving" girls and women, which appear to be based on nothing but their rising academic success.)

What issues of diversity arise when we do not balance this statistic? What issues might occur if we do correct the issue?

I'd like to know how the student who prepared this bulletin board would answer these questions. Any appeal for affirmative action for men in this situation is illegitimate, though, because affirmative action is appropriate only when there is sustained systematic discrimination against a group, that persists after legal barriers have been removed. There never have been legal or systemic barriers against men in academia (aside from racial and other barriers that affected women along with men), and I see no sign of them now, so there doesn't appear to be any reason to give preference to males in university admissions -- aside from good old-fashioned sexism. What issues of diversity arise, I wonder, from a bulletin board like this, which misleads the viewer and insults both the female and the male students who live in the dormitory it is supposed to serve?