Gender and Moderation

Reject binaries and focus on complex adaptive systems instead

I had a great conversation about gender yesterday with Sabine from the podcast The Curious Task while discussing my recent guest-edited issue of the journal Cosmos+Taxis. (That podcast will be out shortly and I’ll update with the link when it is).

I hadn’t fully made the connection in my brain before that podcast interview about how moderation and gender interact, but once we were talking it just kept sticking in my brain. (There might be some availability bias in action there too.)

In my introduction to that issue, which I won’t replicate here, I argue that thinking about gender as an emergent order helps us move beyond the nature-nurture/conservative-progressive approach to gender that bedevils a lot of our social and political conversations.

In short, depending on our particular ideological lens and location on the political spectrum, we tend to ascribe to gender either biological inflexibility or cultural/individual fluidity.

The reality is actually not on the spectrum at all, but all around it. And this is because gender isn’t a single thing with measurable biological or constructed characteristics. We can’t say that gender is 20% biology and 80% socially constructed, for example. And that’s because gender isn’t a single thing at all, but a complex adaptive system or an emergent order.

What do I mean?

Gender and Complex Adaptive Systems

Gender is a lot like language, another complex adaptive system. The human capacity for language is natural and learning language is a natural part of human life (perhaps the most natural and most human thing we do, according to Aristotle).

Language also helps us coordinate our behavior to carry out crucial human tasks, including those relating to survival and reproduction, in a deeply social environment.

Similarly, we have a natural human capacity for gender expression. Learning gender, so to speak, is a natural (i.e. intuitive and often instinctive) part of human development. Gendered distinctions and identity rank as a universal across all human societies and gendered behavior shows up very quickly after birth.

Moreover, gender identity and performance (to use Judith Butler’s phrase) are crucial to human reproduction and probably also help coordinate a range of other important social tasks. At the most simple level, gendered behavior and expression serve as signals to other people about what kind of mates someone might be interested in and what kinds of roles they might fulfill (though both these get tricky, particularly as societies and gender identities become more diverse).

Interestingly, what little I know about language and gender development demonstrates parallels as well. Children learn both language and gender by watching, imitating, and practicing, but this learning itself is intuitive. And these activities take place within a biological framework, shaped by genetics and hormones and neural networks. There are biological constraints to both our language and gender fluidity, and these biological constraints have important social, political, and legal ramifications.

And crucially, both language and gender interact with other emergent orders, like economics, social status, ethnic, racial, and national identity, and so on. People of different social statuses speak differently and they also perform gender differently. And as Kimberlé Crenshaw famously noted (or infamously, depending on your priors) race and economic precarity interact with gender to influence legal and political structures as well.

Gender and Moderation

So what does this all have to do with radical moderation? Most obviously, gender is another example of our binary thinking being wrong (again). Thinking about gender on a spectrum from nature to nurture not only misleads us, but it leads to fundamental misunderstandings about the phenomenon itself. More dangerously, it also leads us into meaningless political wrangling over chromosomes or the patriarchy, when what we really should be asking ourselves is what various human beings of various kinds need to flourish.

I would need a much longer format to do this subject justice, but in general, understanding gender as a complex adaptive system helps us understand human behavior and helps us moderate political debates over gender.

On the one hand, conservative fears of a genderless or androgenous future where traditional gender roles disappear are probably overwrought. There are enduring patterns to gender expression across human societies and across time. Given what we know about humans over thousands of years, women in the future will probably still do more care-taking work on average than men, but men are still perfectly capable of doing more (and probably should). But those thousands of years of human history also teach us that how societies organize and think about gender is enormously diverse.

On the other hand, progressive or left-wing convictions that biology is meaningless for gender identity and gendered behavior are being disproven not only by thousands of years of human life but also by the experiences of those who transition from one gender identity to another. Many trans folks have noted that hormone therapy changes their outlook and their way of thinking about the world and interacting with others. So despite the great variation of human gender expression, it’s not a radically fluid variation. There are biological constraints that shape the way humans express gender across a range of locations.

Gender expression demonstrates what my advisor Larry Arnhart calls “patterned variation” and it shares in common with other kinds of complex adaptive systems that there is an enormous amount of variation in the system, but at the root are simple patterns that stem from basic and often inflexible rules.

There’s a lot more to be said and I know my account above leaves out a LOT of details, but I’ll leave this here for now with a couple questions for my readers: Does thinking about gender as a complex, adaptive system help us moderate current political debates over gender? Or am I too optimistic here?

Let me know in the comments! And please, as always, if you find this interesting or provocative or anything else, share!