Men, Women, etc.

03 Aug 2025

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I recently read Ursula K. Le Guin’s excellent novel The Left Hand of Darkness. The story focuses on an ambassador from a futuristic federation of planets who is trying to convince the people of Gethen to join the federation. The people of Gethen are humanoids, but they lack any distinguishing sex characteristics most of the time. They only take on primary and secondary sex characteristics for a few days each month, then revert back to their neuter state.

Today, I am going to consider gender. This topic is a goddamn minefield, and so I will ask my audience to grant me a great deal of grace when reading this piece. Nothing I say here is meant to be definitive or conclusive. I am no expert. I am going to proceed by examining the ways that my own intuitions about and thoughts on gender have evolved as the cultural context around me has evolved. I leave the metaphysical, moral, and political theorizing about gender to the experts.

Ferdinand Leeke, The Mermaids, 1921

The first time I can remember thinking about gender is sometime in middle school. I had pretty much unrestricted access to the internet and had social media accounts on Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr. Tumblr was where the gender action was happening. I remember seeing debates about the ontology of gender, about what pronouns people should use, about terms like “otherkin” and “two-spirit” and “demisexual”.

I didn’t get it, and I probably thought it was a little weird. But because I was a child, I didn’t expect to get it. I absorbed the information, and catalogued it away as something that was important to other people but wasn’t a part of my life. The same way I catalogued away tax rates and hockey. It wasn’t an issue for me, it was just something out there that some people were very passionate about. This was, I think, before debates about the status of transgender people entered the mainstream. It was still a somewhat fringe issue.

The first time I can remember being critical about gender was in high school. We had. as many high schools do, a homecoming court. Part of the homecoming court celebrations involved these short skits where the candidates for homecoming king would save a candidate for homecoming queen from some ruffian. Disney-level plots, maybe a minute or two long. I remember there was a lawsuit brought by a transgender student to end the gendered skits and replace homecoming king and queen with gender neutral designations.

I thought the transgender student had overreacted. Furthermore, I didn’t think the entire school should have to adjust its traditions, which the vast majority of students had a lot of fun with, to cater to one student. I don’t think I veered so far into transphobia that I was against the idea of this student being transgender. As far as I remember I took a pretty libertarian stance: do whatever you want with your own gender expression, just don’t ruin our fun in the process.

High school was also when I started to develop an interest in women. Suddenly the differences between male and female felt very significant to me. I did not understand women at all. At least, I felt I didn’t. Maybe this is why the differences between men and women felt so significant, maybe I constructed a larger gap than there really was. Nonetheless, I did alright on the dating scene in high school, I wasn’t an incel, I still managed to connect with women on some level. I’m sure I still acted like a freak sometimes. But who doesn’t in high school?

Ultimately, my goal wasn’t to figure out gender or to understand the condition of women in high school. I was just doing my best to manage wild hormonal imbalances and schoolwork. I was more dealing with the phenomena of gender than I was trying to impose some vision of what gender should be on the world. Sure, I wasn’t on board with our traditions being overhauled but I also wasn’t about to lead a protest to preserve them. I think that whole affair was little more than a piece of interesting gossip, not a cause the student body was rallying around. Issues around genderqueer people were still not precipitated to the full-blown culture war they are today, as far as I can remember.

David Stern, Saint Vitus Dance (The Return of the Flagellants), 2020

In college, I remember taking a course on the history of gender and sexuality in ancient Greece and Rome. The ancient Greeks and Romans had, unsurprisingly, wildly different views of gender and sexuality than what we have today. They also had debates about gender and sexuality (Plato’s Symposium is an excellent example), as we do today. That class instilled in me a deep skepticism about our current ideas (all major viewpoints considered) of gender and sexuality. The ancients, too, were pretty sure they were right about their gender concepts.

Throughout college I, for the first time, came into contact with transgender people. I found the people I met to be, surprisingly, not freakish aliens. They were just normal college students. They were worried about their finals. They wanted to know where the good parties would be. They had their own unique problems but I found myself sympathetic. This is, of course, a common side effect of contact with groups with whom one is unacquainted.

I also, throughout college and beyond, came to see women as less foreign. There was no eureka moment, I just kept coming into contact with women and kept finding that the differences I thought were present were constructions or projections of my own psyche. I have, by and large, stopped attributing personality quirks of the women in my life to their gender, and instead started recognizing them as weirdos in and of themselves.

In graduate school I’ve had conversations with transgender and nonbinary philosophers, to whom I am grateful for their infinite patience as I’ve tried to work out my thoughts on sex and gender in real time. The culture wars around gender are in full swing, so I’ve found it more important to try to understand what gender is and what gender could be. There is a lot of certainty out there in the world about what the correct conceptual scheme of sex and gender is. I do my best not to indulge.

I do, however, have intuitions. In the past year I have made a concerted effort to learn more about sex and gender. I’ve listened to history podcasts about transgender people, I’ve read queer and feminist fiction. I’ve done my best to try to cultivate more mature views. As I’ve done so, I’ve become more and more open to the idea that we have encoded far too much into our concepts of gender. I am sympathetic to a view I’ll call gender eliminativism: we should just do away with all gendered concepts and categories, and live more like the people on Gethen. A society without gender, and therefore without discrimination based on gender, where sex only matters when it’s time to doink.

But the view I am currently sympathetic to isn’t important. I have changed my mind about gender in the past, and I will almost certainly change it again in the future. I am tempted, here, to moralize, and to urge my readers away from certainty. “Remember the fools who came before you!” I might say, rallying the masses to Socratic ignorance. But such an ending would be corny, and heavy handed. Instead, I’ll try to be cryptic and mysterious, and close with some Emily Dickinson:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

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Please let me know your thoughts! Thanks for reading!