The Challenge of "Gender Identification Disorder"

Debra Shogan
University of Alberta

Ann Diller, Barbara Houston, Kathryn Morgan, and Maryann Ayim were beacons for me in the early eighties as I attempted to locate myself as a doctoral student and as a woman within the philosophy of education. Later, I felt welcomed by each of them into the community of feminist scholars writing in the philosophy of education and feminist studies. It is indeed an honor for me to have the opportunity to respond to a book by philosophers whose work in feminist ethics and feminist pedagogy I have admired for so long.

By necessity, I must focus my comments and I do this by looking more closely at what counts as gender within a question about gender in education. Ayim and Houston argue that one of the criteria by which to assess the adequacy of the analysis of a moral term is that the "analysis must capture all the ethically significant cases" (p. 18). In this paper, I hope to push the boundaries of what might be recognized as ethically significant instances of gender-sensitive education by opening up "gender" as a category. By opening up gender to other significations, it should be possible to expand alternatives to the important questions Houston poses in one of her essays: "Is gender operative here? How is gender operative? What other effects do our strategies for eliminating gender bias have?" (p. 61).

The essays in The Gender Question in Education are exemplary of philosophical analysis. Surprisingly, however, gender is not systematically addressed as an analytical category. The few attempts at even a descriptive definition of gender are taken up by Houston who opts for gender as signifying "a set of relations between the sexes" (p. 61) and gender as signifying social rather than biological "differences between the sexes" (p. 84n). This assumption of two sexes to which the social adheres results in the assertion that "we have only two genders" (p. 146).

Houston's essay, "Theorizing Gender: How Much of It Do We Need?" provides a way into exploring the adequacy of these limits on gender. In this essay, Houston critically looks at a paper by Bronwyn Davies in which Davies argues for a deconstructionist approach to understanding gender (p. 75). After a convincing critique of the implications of deconstruction as understood by Davies, Houston concludes that, "a more promising deconstructionist position is advanced by Judith Butler."

Had Judith Butler and not Davies written the paper on a deconstructionist approach to gender in education, much different conclusions might have been reached about the value of deconstruction for understanding gender. Whereas Houston concludes from Davies that deconstruction leads to the abandonment of categories, Butler makes clear that to deconstruct is not "to negate or throw away."^[1] Far from eliminating categories, deconstruction calls into question, problematizes, and "opens up" a category for "a reusage or redeployment that previously has not been authorized."^[2] Deconstruction is "a way of interrogating [a category's] construction as a pregiven or foundationalist premise"^[3] and demonstrates "how the very establishment of the system as a system impies a beyond to it, precisely by virtue of what it excludes."^[4] I might also add that the impulse of deconstruction is different from that of analytic philosophy; analytic philosophy establishes and distinguishes boundaries of a concept or category, while the task of deconstruction is to trouble and break open these boundaries.

Houston worries that deconstruction "might leave a child not knowing whether she is a girl or a boy [or neither?]" (p. 81). In opening up alternatives for gender, deconstruction breaks apart the presumed coherence between and among sexed bodies, gendered behavior, and sexuality and permits the possibility, for example, that a female sexed child might "know" something about her/his gender not contained by the categories "boy" or "girl." Gender does not disappear but it is polymorphous and unpredictable.

In a culture in which gender is arbitrarily tied to sex and in which "we are socially and communicatively helpless if we do not know the sex of everybody we have anything to do with,"^[5] it is appropriate to worry about those who disrupt the assumption that sexed bodies, gender, and sexuality cohere because there are real punishing effects for those who confuse others about their gender or sexuality. But, if the alternative is a conformity to a dishonest gender rigidity, it is as necessary to worry about ways in which all children, but particularly nonconforming children, are forced into normalizing their bodies, gender, and sexuality within an arbitrary two-sex, two- gender, one-sexuality system.

Let me explain by way of an example. In her literally shocking book, Gender Shock: Exploding the Myths of Male & Female, Phyllis Burke tells the stories of children forced by parents and teachers to conform to gender standards.^[6] One of the children, seven-year-old Becky, was identified by experts as having "female sexual identity disturbance."^[7] What did Becky do to be pathologized in this way? Burke writes:

Becky liked to stomp around with her pants tucked into her cowboy boots, and she refused to wear dresses. She liked basketball and climbing...She liked to play with her toy walkie-talkies, rifle, dart game, and marbles. She stood with her hands on her hips, fingers facing forward. She swung her arms, and took big, surefooted strides when she walked.^[8]

A core gender identity, tentatively supported by Houston (p. 81), may be helpful in tracing technologies which construct the embodiment of this core, but it is important to recognize that psychiatrists rely on an assumption of the "realness" of a core gender identity to pathologize children. Gender Identity Disorder of Childhood is regarded as a "pathology involving the Core Gender Identity...consistent with one's biological sex."^[9] Clinics to "cure" gender identity disorder are often as near as the local university hospital.

The number of girls vulnerable to diagnosis has dramatically increased as girls become more assertive and as they engage in "rough-and-tumble play" which, "in psychological terminology, is the hallmark of the male child."^[10] Ruckers, Becky's psychiatrist, has stated that gender identity disorder can be determined by comparing a child with same-sex, same-aged peers in athletic skills such as throwing a ball and percentage of baskets made from the free throw line. As Burke, sardonically comments, "I...hate to think that a child's diagnosis of mental health...depend[s] on basketball shots made, or not made, from the free throw line."^[11] That uncoordinated boys and coordinated girls are vulnerable to a gender identity disorder diagnosis, has quite profound implications for a gender sensitive physical education. Physical education for boys becomes a normalizing pursuit while physical education for girls has the potential to increase "gender deviance."^[12]

The "cure" for Becky's "gender identity disorder" (GID) consisted of one hundred and two sessions of behavior modification in the clinic and ninety-six sessions in her bedroom. She was rewarded for playing with "feminine sex-typed" toys and behavior and rejecting "masculine sex-typed" toys and behavior. Lest it is thought that Becky's story is as an example of a 1950s overkill, these interventions are recommended to doctors in Ruckers, Handbook of Child and Adolescent Sexual Problems published in 1995.^[13]

As Burke indicates, "rather than being 'cured', Becky's self-esteem was destroyed" by constant monitoring. "Her...desires and feelings had been worn down, split off from her everyday world, only to become hidden within a secret and shamed place inside her. Becky valiantly strove for acceptance and to do what was necessary in the face of overwhelming odds. She wanted to earn back love, and if that meant choosing the pots and pans over the soft-ball mitt, so be it."^[14] A desire to cooperate, a typically "feminine" behavior, overrode Becky's desire to play with "masculine sex-typed" toys. Rather than recognize a hybridity to gender identity, Becky, like the rest of us, was forced into one of two manifestations of gender.

Houston writes that she thinks "that core gender identity is mutable in the sense that we can change the meaning of what it is to be a girl or a boy, a woman or man, even if we cannot or do not want to abolish gender in the sense of changing an individual's sense of themselves as being one or the other." She goes on to say that, "if we can alter the meaning of what it is to be female or male then, even if the categories continue to be bipolar, the dominance-subordinance structuring can be removed" (p. 83). But, if meaning is mutable such that "boy" can mean either feminine or masculine and feminine and masculine can include a range of possibilities, this cannot help but call into question "boy" as an identity and the worthiness of a bipolar system of categorization.

It is not even necessary to rely on deconstruction to open up the limits of a bipolar system of categorization. The work could also be done by medical science if practitioners broke the silence about the inexact relationship between sex chromosomes and genitalia or indeed about the existence of at least five sexes - what Anne Fausto-Sterling refers to as male, intersexed male, true intersexed male, intersexed female, and female.^[15]

Diller speaks for her coauthors when she writes, that "taking a gender-sensitive perspective on education can open up new angles of vision, expand our range of alternatives, alter our priorities, change our preoccupations, and help us to think more creatively about longstanding educational problems" (p. 2). Opening up the category of gender to other significations, increases exponentially the possibilities for a gender-sensitive education and permits many sets of answers to Houston's questions: Is gender operative here? How is gender operative? What other effects do our strategies for eliminating gender bias have?

A gender-sensitive education might in some instances not even foreground gender. It would allow, for example, that a sensitivity to how things turn out for girls in education may in some instances have little to do with gender and more to do with race, class, or sexuality. Importantly, opening up gender and, as a consequence, what counts as gender-sensitivity would not only make it possible to recognize sexist distinctions between "boys" and "girls," it would permit a sensitivity to the rigidity of these categories. This expanded gender-sensitivity would allow distinctions between gender conforming females and males and nonconforming females and males and a noticing of whether gender conformists do better at school.

---

[1] Judith Butler, "Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of 'Postmodernism,'" Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott (New York: Routledge, 1993), 15.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., 9.

[4] Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit (New York: Routledge, 1992), 1.

[5] Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality (Calif.: Freedom, 1983), 22.

[6] Phyllis Burke, Gender Shock: Exploding the Myths of Male and Female (New York: Anchorage Books, 1996).

[7] Ibid., 5.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 158.

[10] Burke, Gender Shock, 5.

[11] Ibid., 205.

[12] Ibid., 204.

[13] Ibid., 19.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Anne Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender (New York: Basic Books, 1992).