This is the third part of my article on yin-yang, an elegant, complex and often completely misinterpreted symbol. Yin-yang shouts to the cosmos that we humans tend to see dichotomies where they do not exist. But many don’t hear this message. In Part 1: Yin-yang not, I covered the tendency to interpret the yin-yang symbol as about 'natural' opposites, and in Part 2: Yin-yang seriously not, I explored misinterpretations of yin-yang specifically related to the gender stereotypes of feminine or masculine.
I draw on the ideas in Parts 1 and 2 to develop the argument in this final part of the article, so you might find a quick review is helpful.
So now finally, I’m putting it out there: it’s time to ditch thinking about people with a dichotomy of feminine/masculine traits.
Dichotomies are definitely useful. Until they are not.
Dichotomies are helpful and necessary a lot of the time; they simplify how we think about the world and save us the mental energy of having to explore every option, degrees of nuance, and all possible complexities before making any single decision. In Part 1, I explained just how central dichotomies are to human thinking.
Unfortunately, we tend to forget that these simplifying categories are ‘mental boxes’ that humans create, and their purpose is to help us focus our attention on just a few details in order to make decisions efficiently. They do not necessarily reflect reality at all.
Some are indeed ‘true’ dichotomies - where things can only be in one category or the other, like the true dichotomy of planet versus a star. (True dichotomies are more likely in physics and biology, but even then, the picture can be complicated and dynamic).
The problem is we often create ‘false’ dichotomies: quick, convenient simplifications of people and the world, where we just ignore messy complexity. We can then get quite attached to this false dichotomy, and we can end up blind to reality, or at least extremely blinkered.
In Yin-yang not, I gave examples of thinking of people as left/right wing, safe/dangerous, able/disabled - much more complicated concepts than just ‘this one thing OR that one thing’. But we ‘put’ people into these ‘boxes’. Each of these is a false dichotomy - just think about real people you know in terms of a dichotomy of able/disabled. Do you consider someone who wears glasses as disabled? No. What about someone who wears hearing aids? Mmmm. We put one in the ‘able box’ and the other in ‘disabled box’. What about someone who needs assistance to eat? Is that different from someone who needs assistance to swim or use a computer? Both need assistance to do activities of daily life, but we decide one is ‘disabled’ and the other ‘able’. We’ve just created two categories of ‘able’ and ‘disabled’ and ignore all the evidence they are not discrete and opposite conditions.
I think we’ve done this with gender stereotypes. We’ve taken the complexity and diversity of human traits and behaviours and created a simplistic, convenient, but false dichotomy of feminine versus masculine.
And the dichotomy is blinding us to human wholeness.
However, it doesn’t follow to create a dichotomy of human traits according to biological sex, unless masculine/feminine is a ‘true’ dichotomy too, and the categories never overlap.
Does seeing human traits and behaviour as a dichotomy of masculine and feminine also reflects reality? Is masculine a completely separately category, with no possible overlap ever from feminine? Does it help us to understand the way the world is, the way each of us is?
It clearly doesn’t.
We know it about ourselves; we know it about our close friends and family. We recognise a complex range of human traits in the people we know, despite the gender stereotypes of our culture. We know men who are quiet, caring and patient. We know women who are logical, confident and independent. We know both men and women who express assertiveness, loyalty, greed, sincerity, competitiveness, tenderness, jealousy, generosity, scepticism - a complex combination of supposedly masculine and feminine traits.
But when we think about people we don't know and about the broader world, we often resort to a simplistic dichotomy.
Often, we need to twist our thinking and our words to maintain this simplistic thinking. Because we are so deeply attached to a dichotomy of feminine/masculine, we describe the sporty, assertive girl as a tomboy (she must have a high ‘level’ of yang!); the quiet, uncertain teen boy asking for assistance as a bit of a sissy; the single older man patiently and gently caring for his frail parents as effeminate; or the high achieving business woman as cold and un-nurturing. We criticise tough or aggressive women as butch or nasty; we dismiss emotionally expressive or unambitious men as not real men.
We know them, we see them, but we don’t say, ‘Wow, both men and women are actually quite varied hey? Maybe a division into two categories of masculine and feminine traits doesn’t make sense…’ Instead, we mock the person who doesn’t fit the dichotomy - the ‘mental box’ in our heads. We need that dichotomy to be true so much that we stigmatise and make life hard for those who don’t 'fit in the box’, to the point that many people hide their real selves. We divide humans biologically as male or female, which leads to few role differences for men and women (like breastfeeding is a female role, etc). A true dichotomy. We then use to to divide all human traits and behaviours as masculine or feminine. A false dichotomy.
We impose this false dichotomy on people, and we ignore evidence that it is not true and not how the world is really. And we discredit people who we can’t ignore.
Just what the yin-yang cautions us to guard against.
The false dichotomy of a masculine/feminine split of human traits blinds us to human complexity and human wholeness. And, I would add, to the requirements of human well-being as well.
Yin-yang is a wonderful reminder that we humans get very attached to false dichotomies, and we tend to think there are only two options. There may well be other ways to think about people altogether.
Some suggest new gender categories, perhaps a ‘trichotomy’ of masculine, feminine and androgyne. Or a group of five if you to add agender (none) and genderfluid (all). A ‘quintochotomy’? Some prefer non-binary, which reinforces an assumption that a binary (true dichotomy) exists, even if you individually are outside it. It makes a dichotomy of binary vs non-binary people. Pangender - more than one gender - because we all know those gender categories are real things, right?I could go on. But I won’t.
I don’t think an array of more and more gender categories is helpful, particularly when many of these new words for new categories are a mixed up mash of bits of words for ‘traditional’ gender traits categories (feminine/masculine) with social gender roles (man/woman) with alignment with gender identity (like cis/trans) with sexual attraction (like hetero/homo/bi/a) with biological sex (i.e. male/female). And more.
Reacting against the gender dichotomy by creating a different set of categories still leaves us stuck in mental ‘boxes’ (just more of them). Boxes that are determined by the alignment with biological sex and that don’t actually reflect reality. I understand it’s hard to talk about something as deeply internalised and personal as one’s gender identity, more so if a person has gender dysphoria. But this proliferation of gender category words doesn’t make it any easier. Words with no shared meaning float around, confusion results, and those who don’t understand the issue in the first place are likely to turn off. Or mock the words, the ideas and the people altogether.
Young people are rejecting the gender dichotomy because it is stifling and inadequate to talk about human diversity and complexity. Some young people who feel conflicted about their gender identity think there’s something wrong with them.
It’s actually the idea of separate categories for human traits and behaviours that is determined by biological sex that has something wrong with it.
I want to suggest we do what the yin-yang symbol actually says and reflect on the fact that humans create dichotomies for ease and convenience. They are not real things in the physical world; they are creations (ideas) of the human mind.
When an idea no longer serves us, we could stop using it.
I think the idea of human traits as a dichotomy of feminine or masculine no longer serves us.
My argument is that a gender dichotomy itself is false, does not represent human complexity, and is an inappropriate and unhelpful lens to consider human traits and behaviours. The biological sex of a person does not determine if they have a capacity for nurturing or ambition, for example. It just determines if we let them express it. This restriction causes misery - for the minority who rebel against a presumed gender category, but also for the many who repress core parts of themselves because those traits are 'in the wrong box'.
Likewise, dividing people's traits and behaviour into any number of categories (dichotomy, trichotomy, quintochotomy, even a centochotomy) doesn’t reflect reality. It doesn’t help us make sense of each other or the world. Men and women are diverse, nuanced and variable. And not able to be put in a 'box'.It is amusing to me that along with our human propensity to impose mental ‘boxes’ onto other people, each of us loathes the idea of being ‘stuck in a box’. The resistance to being stereotyped (and not related to gender) is so ubiquitous that have a saying for it: ‘Don’t pigeonhole me!’
I think it's time to take the glare of the spotlight off biological sex and gender altogether.
That’s why I like Mae’s idea that we take the focus off gender to talk about people. In the article on Gendered adjectives, she challenges the idea that human traits and behaviours can be categories in a direct relationship to biological sex at all.
We still need short cuts to thinking, we will still tend to simplify the world with categories, but we need to find categories that are more helpful, that more closely reflect the way the world is, that help us understand ourselves and other people better.
Mae suggested we use categories of human traits related to what is important for human wholeness, meaningfulness and wellbeing - the needs for competence, relatedness and autonomy. Instead of feminine and masculine traits linked firmly to one biological sex only, Mae suggests the three categories of instrumental, connective and expressive traits which every person needs. We will still be men and women. There are inherent biological and physiological sex differences. We can also still be masculine or feminine if we want, but not use this as the primary way we define our identity.
Men would no doubt express their instrumental, connective and expressive traits differently from women. But then, each man would express these traits differently from other men.
To start, we do need to stop insisting that the true dichotomy of biology sex is a justifiable basis of a false dichotomy of traits and behaviours as masculine or feminine. If we did, we could dismantle or at least lower the unbreachable walls we have built around human traits and behaviour ‘traditionally appropriate’ for either men or women.
Men and women are diverse, nuanced, varying, and complex. Human wholeness and wellbeing start with appreciating this complexity, even if it makes us uncomfortable sometimes.
We could then be whole people in the true sense of the yin-yang symbol.
Sources for images, all used under Creative Commons
- Yin-yang outline: Yin-yang symbol: Dessy92 [Public domain]
- Male/female sign: 123Freevectors
- Man and woman inside yin-yang: Rampages
- Triple yin-yang: pd4u [CC0]
- Container: https://jdorganizer.blogspot.com/2007/09/15-lego-storage-options.html
- Pigeonholes: Yoni Freedhoff
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