Three Isn’t Always a Crowd: The Third Gender
“I am the third sex, not a man trying to be a woman. It is your society’s problem that you only recognize two sexes.” (Hijra Mona Ahmed to author Dayanita Singh).~Wikipedia on Hijra culture.
Before I kick off into the body of this post, I want to make a disclaimer up front. I realize that gender is a sensitive issue without a simple, black and white answer. It is also a vast, complex topic. So I have left things out, and perhaps over-simplified other aspects. No disrespect is intended in any case. And in all cases, I have many lovely genderqueer friends to thank for my own understanding of the gray area and of the unique position occupied by those who do not fit into the either/or.~Jaym
Nothing quite gets under modern society’s skin like gender.
I recently attended a panel on taboos in horror film. Were there any left? The answer? Transsexuality, homosexuality, real death and pedophilia. (Note: this was not what people in the audience found disturbing–with the exception of the pedophilia–but an analysis based on film trends.) The continuing cases dealing with murder of transsexual people, the prejudice and hatred in common-use slurs should warn us that this is an issue that needs to be understood and dealt with immediately.
Unfortunately, it gets shoved under the rug, like so many other things, and we go on calling ourselves Land of the Free.
And then we go and discover that olive trees have a third gender, Ginko Biloba trees can change their sex and pygmy mice are gendered by an unusual set of chromosomes. Many non-Western/Indigenous people see a third gender as a part of normal life and human sexuality. And Star Trek beat us to the punch with a three-gender alien society. Oops.
Gender is so binary in adult life that it trickles down to our children as well. I’ve used the story before of my own school experience. A Christian private school, doctors/lawyers/etc’s kids. The most common activity for girls during the first few grades? Sticking a ball under your shirt and pretending to be pregnant. The boys played rough, took their dune buggies out and played sports.
In reality, kids do not have built-in gender binarism. My friend’s son paints his nails blue and orange, because he thinks it looks cool. Two of my male childhood friends played house with me in kindergarten. I always had boys as my closest friends because I often don’t ‘get’ how women communicate. Girls play with the boys, play sports, excel in science if given the chance. Unfortunately, although girls are now given a wider range of choices in gender expression, it is still a tight little box for boys.
Gender is a fluid, uncertain thing in modern society. Not so with many animals, fish, invertebrates and plants! Three genders, five gender-morphs, males turn into females, etc etc etc. It’s an exciting place for gender studies! Some of the notables include:
The majority of mammals have their sex determined by the ‘Y’ chromosome. Typically, XX is female, XY is male. Diverging from this simple pairing usually results in infertility.
Female African Pygmy Mice often carry an XY chromosome pair. A minor mutation of the X chromosome leads to fertile XY female mice.
There are male trees, female trees and hermaphroditic trees. Scientists theorize that, at one point, these trees may have been entirely hermaphroditic.
The hermaphroditic trees can fertilize or be fertilized. Male trees evolved over time as they lost their female characteristics. The population has remained stable for many years, leading to an intriguing model of tri-gender reproduction.
This sparrow has, in essence, four different gender expressions: White-Striped male and female (aggressive and defensive of territory) and the Tan-Striped male and female (providing more parental care and nurturing). Typically, the birds pair with the opposite morph.
The Side-Blotched Lizard of North America has five gender morphs! Large, aggressive males that control harems of females, smaller males with single females, ‘sneaker’ males who breed with the larger lizards’ mates. There are also larger, more aggressive females that lay smaller eggs and smaller females that are less territorial and lay larger eggs.
In many ancient cultures as well, gender was regarded as a less than binary system.
Some indigenous cultures included a third gender. Now called ‘Two Spirit’ in Native American culture, the common explanation was often simple: a male spirit and a female spirit shared a body. Their roles were diverse and central, from accompanying war-parties as nurses to maintaining oral tradition.
A response to the shortage of adult males in the highlands of Albania, sworn virgins are women who take on the societal and lifestyle positions of men. Although they are forbidden to have any sort of sexual relations, they may be the leaders of clans, as well as every day duties.
Though the position of the Sworn Virgin is fading into the background now, their stories are documented in a film by Elvira Dones.
The Hijra of India and Pakistan have one of the most well-known and colorful third-gender histories. Physiological males who have adopted female dress, names and mannerisms, the Hijra have faced extensive persecution and outlaw status.
Through extensive effort on their part, they are now recognized alongside men and women, and given the option of choosing ‘other’ as their gender.
The Hijra are most likely the largest and most cohesive third-gender culture in the world. There are also certain cultures in which girls dress and work as men, while retaining their female names, but these are less common and not as thoroughly studied.
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There are hundreds of examples and specimens that we could examine. But that is not the point of this article. Instead, let us look ahead. How does gender play into our genre fiction?
Authors such as James Tiptree Jr., Nicola Griffiths, Ursula K. Leguin, Poppy Z. Brite and David Brin have pushed the boundaries of sexuality and gender in many and colorful ways. There are still plenty more to be explored, understood and immersed in.
And we don’t even need to look outside of our own society for examples of life outside the binary gender norm. Just take a peek out of common, ‘acceptable’ culture and there’s a whole world to feast on.
Play with the alien’s gene structure, their societal norms. Give their other genders history, a voice. Endless possibilities, and who knows what fascinating things you might find in research.
My find? True History.
Why stop there? Most Terrestrial life requires two genders for reproduction, regardless of how those genders are arranged into individuals (male, female, hermaphrodite) or how gender is perceived by the individual, or other expressions of sexuality and gender divorced from reproduction. Our chromosomes have two parts, and one must come from each parent (in the usual system; there are always exceptions).
But there’s no reason that must be a universal system. Why not genetic material from three? Or four? Or an indeterminate number?
Some sort of recombinant reproduction offers evolutionary advantages over duplication because it increases variation within the species, but reproduction and gender don’t necessarily need to be linked at all. Maybe a far future human society where the two have become entirely separated, maybe an alien society where they were never linked.
There are so many options.
This is indeed fertile (and dangerous) ground where biology and culture intersect. As James Tiptree said to Joanna Russ, “Maybe there are only two sexes: men and mothers.” For humanity, a major contributor to the problem is the asymmetric parental investment, as well as the judgments of relative value.
I wrote about this subject from several angles. Here is an excerpt from The Shifgrethor of Changelings:
“…it dawned on me that unconventional biological and social human genders seem to be predominantly the domain of women in speculative fiction, from singletons (Le Guin’s androgynous Gethenians, Constantine’s hermaphroditic Wraeththu, Slonczewski’s parthenogenetic Sharers) to multiples (Scott’s five-gendered post-FTL humans) to bona fide male pregnancy (in Butler’s Bloodchild). Men tend to stick to dyadic genders and traditional family patterns, even when depicting otherwise exotic aliens.
Biologically, the two gametes of terrestrial lifeforms are a result of evolution once it went down the path of sexual reproduction. There is nothing pre-ordained about this outcome, nor does phenotype mirror genotype: many plants and several animals are unisexual or hermaphroditic, while other animals can switch sexes. Too, biomorphic and behavioral outcomes are not invariably binary. Humans are capable of an enormous repertoire of responses, and I cannot think of one that is completely gender-specific. The troubles start with the relative value assigned to the two genders — and to their behavior, conditioned and enforced by edicts throughout the ages that are as arbitrary as they are punitive.”
The Shifgrethor of Changelings
http://www.starshipreckless.com/blog/?p=74
Equalizer or Terminator?
http://www.starshipreckless.com/blog/?p=316
[...] That article can be found here: Three Isn’t Always a Crowd: Gender [...]
You know, I’m with you on gender-roles being too rigidly defined in our society, but when we get to talking about Hijra as a third gender, aren’t we simply redefining the word “gender”? I was brought up thinking that gender referred to anatomical features, or to a chromosome pair. If we say that two people with the same chromosome pair and anatomical features are different genders because one takes on stereotypically feminine traits while the other takes on masculine traits, haven’t we simply redefined gender to refer to the traits one takes on, or perhaps to some permutation of anatomy and behavior?
If so, how progressive is that, really? Aren’t we really saying, then, that to be a real man or a real woman, you have to conform to traditional gender roles, and that if you don’t, you’re neither male nor female, but some other thing?
Typically a distinction is drawn between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, the former referring to physical sex and the latter referring to psychological and social aspects of identity.
So those lizards, for instance, have only two sexes if you just consider their ‘equipment,’ but have five genders if you consider the roles they play in reproduction.
With humans things get even more complicated, as factors like cultural roles and expectations (and their subversions) come into play, as does a more complicated psychology of identity and desire.
Well written! I admit that I would have liked to have seen more in the way of science to back up many of the examples, but I was pleased with the diversity of your selection. I’d heard of the Sworn Virgins of the Balkans. I wasn’t aware that the Hijra had achieved more in the way of official recognition of their gender identity, although I do hope that they are someday granted equal status free of hate.
Are the Side-Blotched Lizards really afforded categorizations of different gender? The reason I ask is because some male cuttlefish will sneak in and fertilize females who have already mated with larger male cuttlefish, and that the females will accept both types of sperm.
I’m curious why you didn’t include transgendered in your examples.
Could you link and site some of your sources?
Sandra, I linked to the primary sources in the titles, to cut down on clutter. I *would* have liked to go more into detail, but time, room and expertise made me wary of getting too involved.
I didn’t use transgender as an example because I felt that it is too complex a subject to not be its own subject. Beyond that, transgender is a sensitive subject, and one that I am not qualified to comment on. I also felt that it was something that the majority of our readers would have more familiarity with that example.
The research that I found referred to the lizard as 5-gendered. If someone knows more about them, I’d actually like to hear it!
The variation is actually very large in nature and also involves environmental input.
Many (most) plants are “mixed gender”. Some have female and male flowers on separate trees (dioecus, from the Hellenic words meaning “two houses”) some have them on the same tree (monoecus, “one house”), some have only hermaphroditic flowers (monoclinus, “one bed”), some have all 3 types of flowers.
The gender of many reptilian hatchlings depends on the temperature in which their egg developed. Worker bees are “a third gender” in that they are infertile females that can become fully functioning queens if fed royal jelly (this was actually the premise of an old SF story whose author/title I cannot recall). Many fishes switch genders in a shoal, depending on the gender of their surrounding fellows. “Context” gender is also very common, up to and including lions (hill males are monogamous) and apes (urangutans have male dimorphism, with distinct reproductive strategies).
Women behaving and being treated as honorary men is actually fairly common in many cultures that value sons and masculine values in general. The privilege comes with enormous restrictions (enforced virginity with its concomitant lack of direct descendants being the most obvious one). The Klingon women warriors fall squarely into that category — as, of course, do the Norse Valkyries… and Artemis and Athena themselves. Women who usurped male prerogatives without foregoing children (the Amazons being a prime example) were demonized until revisionist/feminist history came along.
Is my earlier comment caught in moderation?
[...] Three Isn’t Always a Crowd: The Third Gender — The latest essay from Science In My Fiction, a fascinating survey of a complex, difficult topic. Which also led me to Sworn Virgins, which is a rich, strange story mine waiting to happen. [...]
It has already happened, in ballads and stories — it just hasn’t been translated to English.
Part of the beauty of being human is that much about gender and sex differences are fair game for questioning and interpretation. Fiction is of course an excellent forum for that exploration.
I possess all the characteristics of a women , so i want to live as a women .
I want to cut-off my male genitals , please help providing some useful details