Copyright © Aaron H. Devor
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In the course of everyday life persons recognized as men are normally males and individuals identified as women are females. In some cases, in public interactions involving persons who are strangers to one another, females are addressed and responded to as men. Some of the females that this happens to are purposely attempting to be perceived and accepted as men, but there are also a number of such women who do not consciously intend to be thought of as men. I call the people in this latter group "gender blending females."
Gender blending females are those people of the female sex who project gender cues that can be socially interpreted as sufficiently masculine to earn them the social status and some of the privileges of men.1 But, as gender blending females, they do not do so in a consistent or purposeful fashion. Among their friends and acquaintances, and to many strangers, they are clearly women. The intriguing aspect of their gender status is that they have clear female identities and know themselves to be women concurrently with gender presentations that often do not successfully communicate these facts to others.
Strangers most often mistake gender blending females for men or boys during brief encounters of an impersonal and public nature, in interactions with clerks in stores, servers in restaurants, strangers on the streets or in buses, and the like. In most circumstances, the gender blending female's awareness that a mistake has occurred begins when a stranger addresses her as "sir," as in "may I help you, sir?" or when her use of a women's public washroom is challenged.
For the purposes of this study, fifteen gender blending females were interviewed for one and a half to four hours each.2 They were asked about their socioeconomic and demographic situations, their relationships with their family members and peers; inquiries were also made about memories they might have had about gender role-learning experiences and a history of their experiences of being mistaken for boys or men. Finally, they were asked whether they felt there were any advantages or disadvantages to their situations, why they thought they were mistakenly identified, and if they had done or would do anything to avoid such mistakes. An analysis of the interview materials sought to discover commonalities that might exist in the women's backgrounds and current experience, and to come to a better understanding of how gender is communicated.
This study involved only fifteen such gender blending females. Each woman's story was particular to her own experience and a reflection of her own personal understanding and memory of the events of her life. Although there were many commonalities among the reports that they gave of the details of their lives, even this small collection of individuals showed great variety. Any generalizations that it is possible to make about these women can only apply to them as individual examples of an unusual gender type. Nonetheless, their experiences suggest interesting interpretations of the functioning of gender on a larger scale.
The evaluation of the information gathered through the interviews relied heavily on Nancy Chodorow3 and Margaret Mahler 4 for psychological theories of early childhood identification and separation. George Herbert Mend's,5 Hans Gerth's, and C. Wright Mills's6 theories of self and society were useful in gaining an understanding of the ways in which people negotiate with their social environment. Erving Goffman's7 and Harold Garfinkel's 8 ideas about social collusion as the process of making sense out of everyday experiences also proved to be invaluable tools for understanding the phenomenon of gender blending. Sandra Bem's "Gender Schema Theory"9 was the thread that ran through all of the analysis, providing the essential perspective that all theories of gender acquisition and maintenance must be interpreted within the framework of the dominant gender schema that defines what might be considered legitimate gender observations and what might not.
The dominant gender schema in Anglo-American society is predicated on a dualistic and hierarchical biological determinist model. The schema rests on the assumption that all people are members of the male or female sex and that sex is both discrete and permanent. Further, the schema postulates that the physical fact of one's sex causes one to be a girl or woman, boy or man, and that girls and women are innately feminine while boys and men are innately masculine. Sex and gender are so firmly linked in this formulation that they have come to be seen as virtually inseparable, and although femininity and masculinity are understood by social scientists to be culturally variable, in the popular gender schema used in daily life, gender roles are also believed to be strongly tied to biological sex. Finally, the schema assumes that the significant measure in all matters of sex and gender is the presence or absence of indicators associated with maleness, thus empowering maleness/ boyness/ manliness/ masculinity as primary statuses and deprecating femaleness/ girlness/ womanliness/ femininity to secondary or derivative positions.
Within this dominant gender schema, all gender attributes and categorizations are cognitively confined to the two major divisions of male and female, and their derivative statuses of girl/boy, man/ woman, feminine/ masculine. Within such a conceptual framework, anything that is not feminine can only be seen and understood as masculine; anyone who is unfeminine is masculine. So females who, for whatever reason, are perceived as unfeminine are perceived to be in the same measure masculine.
It is hypothesized that the women in this study began life either as children who, close to their time of birth, impressed their parents as in some way unfeminine, or as the children of parents who wanted sons. If they were the sort of children whose parents perceived them as unfeminine (by whatever standards their parents employed), they were probably treated by their parents as unfeminine and so did not acquire a strong feminine identity and traditionally feminine habits early in life. If they were the offspring of parents who had hoped for sons, their parents may have unconsciously encouraged them to develop masculine be-havior patterns and an identification with masculinity and maleness.10 Such an identity and habits could then elicit social interactions that might act as further reinforcements of masculine behavior patterns.
These gender blending females could be said to have been raised to become adults who would communicate their femaleness poorly. Their home environments and family dynamics strongly communicated to them the social superiority of men and the powerlessness and ineffectualness of women. They learned from their parents, grandparents, and siblings that the behaviors and attitudes associated with maleness (masculinity) earned one power, respect, and authority while the behaviors and attitudes associated with femaleness (femininity) epitomized weakness, incompetence, and servility.
All but three of the women studied came from families where the mother was in the home on a full-time basis for all or most of their youth. Twelve of them came from families having three or more children, and approximately half of them grew up in families that had more than six children. This combination of factors suggests that although most of these women had a visible female role model available to them in their homes, they probably did not have the benefit of a great deal of her undivided attention, a fact that several women mentioned in the course of their interviews. Some of the women viewed their full-time homemaker mothers as having devoted their lives to ajob that appeared to them, as children, to have been dominated by thankless drudgery and powerlessness.
Twelve of the fifteen families in which these women grew up were probably governed, to some degree, by traditional values. Six went to Catholic schools or described themselves or their families as "religious four grew up in or around the armed forces community; three were raised, at least during their earliest years, by grandparents; and three of the women merely described their upbringings as "strict." Most of these women's families contained within them at least one element that might be presumed to have transmitted to them a conservative framework with which to understand gender and gender roles. A home environment of this type would tend to emphasize the social distinctions between males and females, allow males greater freedoms and privileges, and celebrate masculine accomplishments while disregarding or belittling feminine ones. Several women recalled feeling jealous and competitive with their brothers because of such preferential treatment.
All of these women reported that as girls they enjoyed physical activity and that they were tomboys throughout their early years. Possibly as a result of their enjoyment of physical exertion, each of them has a strong preference for wearing pants whenever possible and many of them recall a clear dislike of dresses. One woman's reasons for her dislike of dresses was typical of the reasons given by others.
I didn't like dresses because I didn't like people seeing my underpants or I didn't like that sort of coyness of if the wind blows or if you bend over, you can't do a head stand or hanging by your knees in the jungle gym. That whole trip, it's embarrassing and degrading and I was aware of that as a kid.Another explained that she didn't start to seriously dislike dresses until her teens:
I hated dresses, I just hated them. It was a very big deal. .. They are impractical... when I was eight I guess I didn't care if somebody saw my underwear. . . when you get older you have to wear nylons and high heels and you just become this ineffectual little bo-bo staggering around. You can't go out and run, you can't go out and sit behind the bleachers and smoke dope on the grass.For these women, dresses and feminine attire provided only an impediment to their enjoyment of physical freedom.
Their preference for vigorous physical activities also led them away from the companionship of girls and into activities in the company of boys. Thirteen out of the fifteen women said that when they were very young they either played mostly with boys or were loners. In their youth, teens, and young adulthood, twelve of them considered team sports a very important part of their lives. One woman spoke for most of them when she said, "All my life I associated mostly with boys because the girls.., just didn't seem to want to have the same kind of fun I do." Two other women were more critical in their appraisals of the activities of most of the other girls that they knew. The first woman explained her preference for boys this way:
I had never found women who were good enough to play with me, who I found challenging. And I really got bored and I didn't like playing women because they weren't good enough, because it slowed me down.A second woman explained her dislike of other girls this way:
What I saw of girls in school was that they weren't very smart and they didn't do very many things, that they weren't strong in their bodies and they didn't use their minds.Although all of them played with girls at some times and several of them had best friends who were girls, they seem to have considered other girls to be either inferior creatures or honorary boys like themselves. It seems likely that their many years of activity within the social sphere of boys and under the discipline of team sports would have imparted to these girls value systems and styles of dress, speech, and movement that could easily appear masculine to a casual observer.
The relationships that these women had with their parents and siblings also share some similarities. Twelve of the fifteen women reported a strong positive identification with an older male present in their family during their early years. Nine of those twelve, and one other woman, indicated a weak identification or negative experience with older females in their early family environment. Additionally, many of them spoke of this pattern continuing throughout their lives.
Many of these women reported that although their mothers were physically present in the home they were in some way unavailable to their daughters. One mother died when her daughter was five years old, another retreated into drug abuse, another was merely out of town a lot, two were holding down the double work day of a full-time job and family responsibilities, and three were just plain busy with so many kids. One woman described her mother as "just really sick of kids, you know by the time I was ten she had been dealing with kids for twenty-five years and she was really tired." Six of them were "embarrassed by," "ashamed of," or "disappointed in" their mothers, and none of them reported a clearly positive overall attitude toward their female parent. One woman described her mother as "a worrying neurotic wimp" and another said that her mother was "everybody's servant." While nine of the women had older sisters, only one of them had any praise for her older sisters and three of them strongly disliked them.
This must be seen in contrast with how these women experienced their fathers and older brothers during their youths. Eight women specifically portrayed their fathers as firmly holding the power in their families. Ten women expressed strong admiration and respect for their fathers and a few of them expressed exceptionally strong positive feelings toward them. They spoke of their fathers in such terms as "my first love" and "my idol."
Seven of these women recalled that their fathers often expressed their power and authority by being disrespectful, abusive, or humiliating toward their mothers. Several women mentioned wishing that their mothers had been more able to assert themselves with their fathers, and being disappointed by their mothers' failure to do so. This situation might have led the girls experiencing it to see the actual power of their fathers amplified and that of their mothers diminished. Such situations might have increased the attractiveness of their fathers as role models while decreasing the appeal of their mothers as feminine examples. As well, six of the women interviewed mentioned some sort of protective attitude or feeling toward their mothers, younger sisters, or female playmates. In this context, such protectiveness could be seen as one more step in the assumption of a masculine posture.
Perhaps more importantly, many of their fathers took a special interest in their daughters. In these families, the attention that fathers paid to their daughters was akin to that found in the conventional upbringing of boys, at the same time as many of the mothers were providing weak role models. One result of this situation was that many of these gender blending females strongly identified during their youth with men and all things masculine. Following closely on such a masculine identification came the motivation to actively seek out information about how to conform to a masculine role and a desire to do so.
Eight of them came from homes where their fathers acted as if they would have preferred their daughters to have been sons and so enlisted their daughters as surrogate sons. Their fathers could be said to have, in many ways, raised their daughters to be boys. One woman's relationship with her father illustrates this most graphically. Her mother told her that her
father was raised with a bunch of boys and now he got married and wanted to have sons but he had two daughters and although he loved you both very much, he still needed to have a male to identify with.
Her father chose his first born daughter to become his son. He called her by the masculine nick-name "Bud"11 and encouraged others to relate to her as a boy. She recalls:
I can remember people coming up and my father would be talking to them and they'd say, "Well, is this your son?" And my father would laugh and say "This is my son, Sarah."... He was really good about it He didn't think that I had to wear dresses or be feminine to be a girl.
Another told of how her father chose his older of three daughters to share with him those chores that a father might otherwise share with a son.
He taught me a lot of things, outdoors, like fixing a car, everything I know about cars. And he was an electronics tech so I know a lot about wiring of houses. We built our basement in three houses that we lived in, so I helped with that and helped with the wiring and stuff. So a lot of the typical trades I learned from him . . because he needed help and it was usually me he called on, because there was no way that my sister would have done it.
Others, as girls who only weakly identified with other females, found that the only way to get the attention of their fathers was to excel at sports.
Still others of these women found masculinity attractive as a result of their experiences with their older brothers. One woman told of being best friends with her older brother and almost like twins. Another simply said that "anything my brother did I thought was great!" Still another remembered competing with an older brother for her father's affection. One woman remembered feeling this way about her brother:
I was very conscious of the different ways that boys and girls were treated from an early age... .I was a feminist when I was eight. . . boys got treated this way and girls got treated that way and they got the better deal for the most part and I didn't want to put up with that.... They didn't get hassled about hanging out by the river so much.., it wasn't such a big deal for them to go off into the hills. I wasn't supposed to go unless my brother was with me when I was little but he could go by himself. I wasn't supposed to play football. I wasn't supposed to get quite as dirty.
Another decided that the only solution was to become a boy, so, together with another eight-year-old girl, she hatched a scheme:
She was the world's best boy and I was the second best boy. . . we were tough, very tough.... We both had brothers and they had a lot of fun. And they had black rubber boots with orange around it and we weren't allowed to have them because we were girls. And they used to get to go out on Saturday mornings and we didn't because we were girls so we called each other boys.
This course of action seemed to be a logical solution to an eight-year-old's frustration with the limitations of the traditional female role.
At least three of these women were incest survivors and one was raped repeatedly by her husband during her marriage. All four made comments that seemed to indicate that they may have turned to masculinity, in part, as a shield against the vulnerability of their femaleness. The woman who had been raped by her husband said simply: "I was raped many times by my husband. So now I decided that I was going . . . to be the man." All three of the women who reported suffering incest told of very strong desires to become boys during their childhoods; two of them started reading and making inquiries about sex change operations and continued, at the time of their interviews, to find the idea fascinating.
In their early years, these fifteen women were funnelled toward masculinity by some or all of the following factors: (1) They grew up in home environments in which traditional gender values were relatively strong. (2) Their mothers, and! or older sisters, and! or grandmothers either were not prominent in their early years or were seen by these girls as weak and ineffectual people. (3) They had fathers who either enlisted them as surrogate sons or only provided them with affection as a reward for masculinity. (4) Their experience of incest made maleness seem invulnerable. (5) They took pleasure in vigorous physical activity and were encouraged in this direction by other family members and! or peers (usually male). (6) Their peer group consisted mostly of boys who supported and reinforced tendencies toward masculinity while discouraging and punishing femininity. In individuals where all six of these factors were strongly present, the feminine identity of the girl was so deeply suppressed as to result in self-doubts regarding their own femaleness. Three women in this group had seriously considered sex-change operations at some time prior to their interviews.
For eight of these girls, puberty and adolescence brought anxieties and conflicts. Anglo-American societies are relatively tolerant of "tomboyism" in young girls. Before puberty, it would seem, there is nothing to be lost by allowing little girls to indulge in boyish pastimes. During puberty, females become biologically capable of performing the social roles associated with procreation. It was at this age that these girls were confronted with intense social pressures, from both peers and family, to abandon their masculine habits and become "ladies." The girls were pushed toward more feminine ways of moving, dressing, and social interaction. They were also pushed toward heterosexuality. But most of these girls were already comfortable with themselves as they were and they resisted many of the sudden changes demanded of them.
One woman remembered her puberty as a difficult time. The changes that were happening to her body were not something that she welcomed, nor were they possible to hide from others.
Grade 8 was the worst year for me. It was the transition year. It was the year that...
there was this whole new social pressure to dress and look nice atschool.... It was just terrible.. . . It bothered me because it meant that I was a girl and I had to start doing something different, that people expected me to do something different. Everybody wanted me to get a bra which I didn't want to do. I was mortified. The whole thing embarrassed me. My mother had never talked to me about it, I didn't have a close sister I could talk to and I didn't have any close girlfriends.... I hung out with boys.., they talked about other things.. . . Things started changing then, there was more of this boy-girl thing. Boys wanted to go out with girls and wanted to feel them up.