Schrödinger’s Drag
The Reinforcing Of Gender Stereotypes Considered As Farce
Setting The Scene
In this article, I’m going to look at the strange thread of anti-trans thought that argues that:
- trans people reinforce gender stereotypes (boo, hiss) while
- people who are gender non-conforming undermine them (huzzah)
Here is an example of that assertion, written in a typically “smitten with the word male” gender critical style:
This apparently has a superficial plausibility to people looking for arguments that allow them to retain a self-image as unprejudiced, progressive thinkers — while simultaneously rationalizing away their visceral dislike of trans people.
But representing trans people as “reinforcing” gender turns on two key, mistaken, assumptions about stereotypes:
- that the strength of stereotypes relates to their reiteration
- that stereotypes of trans people depict them accurately
In the remainder of the article, I examine how the notion quickly collapses in the face of real examples: the idea that a hard boundary can be drawn between trans and GNC (gender non-conforming) people is pure sophistry, leading to absurd consequences when pursued.
Schrödinger’s Drag
Deposition
The idea that an individual’s gender expression acts to reinforce or weaken gender stereotypes has a deep flaw: it assumes that stereotypes are formed and maintained “mathematically” — that the reiteration of a stereotyped trait somehow adds to or subtracts from the weight of the stereotype.
However, stereotypes are not built through totting up the frequency with which traits are exhibited by exemplars of a class (versus non-exemplars).
Stereotypes are rooted in psychology, not in statistics. They can be persistent in the face of contra-evidence, and they act as a ubiquitous prop to the maintenance of prejudice — because they don’t have to correspond to reality.
One of the stereotype traits of sharks is that they are “dangerous to humans”. But this does not correspond to typical shark behaviour: the stereotype is something constructed from the stories we tell about sharks.
The apparent dangerousness of sharks is a consequence of the salience of stories about shark attacks, not something that mechanistically emerges from weighted observations of real world behaviours.
Similarly, many ideas about gender differences were shown to be bereft of an evidential base by Anne Fausto-Sterling in Myths Of Gender some thirty years ago, a finding repeatedly noted ever since. But those ideas still persist, and still drive social and research agendas. They can survive while lacking any solid grounding simply because they are hardwired into gender stereotypes.
Juxtaposition
Drag queens provide us with a great example of how this idea — that GNC and trans people exert opposing forces on gender stereotypes — falls apart on anything more than a cursory glance.
First, consider Lily Savage, for many years, a mainstay of mainstream prime time entertainment in the UK; seemingly a perfect example of a man being gender non-conforming.
Next, consider Peppermint, who competed in the ninth season of RuPaul’s Drag Race; a drag queen who is a trans woman.
Doesn’t it seem highly implausible that one could draw a neat dividing line between the “gender causticness” of Savage and Peppermint, as though they are mirror images?
Can we really distinguish between the differing impact of drag queens who aren’t trans — therefore eroding gender conformity — and those that are trans, who apparently reinforce it?
Superposition
If we can, it would mean that a pair of identical twin drag queens with perfectly matching appearances and mannerisms — one of them trans, the other cis — would respectively reinforce and undermine gender stereotypes.
When encountering one of those twins, we would be in the presence of Schrödinger’s drag: experiencing superposed reinforcement and undermining of gender stereotypes, the ultimate force of which can only be resolved once the correct label has been pinned on: are they the trans twin, or the cis one?
As we can’t (by definition) possibly know what the correct label is by observation alone, then if we were given an unlabelled film clip of one of the twins, we could never know whether what’s been filmed works to undermine or reinforce gender stereotyping.¹
Which is clearly absurd: semiotics is not a subgenre of biography. We can review how elements of the clip (or any media) relate to gender stereotypes without needing to know who the person we are looking at is.²
Of course, an audience’s knowledge about unvoiced aspects of a character or performer can be exploited to add extra levels of meaning/irony/humour to a performance, but that is a very different matter from executing a performance that changes the audience’s mental model of gender stereotypes — after all, Mrs Doubtfire did not dismantle gender norms: it is built on them.
The nonsense of Schrödinger’s drag arises from the insistence that instead of viewing specific traits themselves in terms of their relationship to stereotypes, we are required to view gender stereotypes through the lens of gender itself, by taking account of the class of person that exhibits a trait, and condemning certain of those classes as a result.
The attempt to draw a clear line between GNC and trans people in terms of their effects on “stereotypes” ultimately makes no sense; it simply provides an excuse to deprecate trans people on the basis that they exist, rather than as a result of anything that they uniquely, specifically, do.
Fundamentally, the idea that we should hold certain individuals to account for their own stereotyping is bizarre.
The Trousers-Down Farce Of Trans Stereotyping
Mistaken Identities
Ironically, although people who advance this argument are ostensibly concerned about the harmful impact of “reinforcing” stereotypes, to make their case they themselves heavily on inaccurate stereotypes — of trans women.
For example, there is a very key misunderstanding in the description of trans women as “performing feminine and thinking that makes them a woman”.
This is obviously the notion of someone who has never actually listened to mainstream trans voices. From a trans perspective, the idea that acting in conformance with gender stereotypes would actually make you a specific gender is a complete mirror-world inversion:
- Being trans and in the closet does not dilute your gender identity, any more than being gay and in the closet dilutes your sexual orientation.
- Gender expression that is incongruent with your gender identity (e.g. “boymoding”) does not dilute your gender identity.
- Non-binary people can express themselves however they like without this compromising their gender identity: there is no requirement for non-binary people to use androgynous or “outrageously” genderfucking presentation to “prove” they are non-binary. { Note: exceptionally heavy quote marks are being used in this paragraph. }
The idea that trans/non-binary people believe that gender expression precedes gender identity is a completely laughable misunderstanding (or possibly a wilful misrepresentation) of very basic “Trans 101” concepts.
Trans people explore the gamut of gender expression, to find what is comfortable for them. But they are imagined as “reinforcing gender stereotypes”, through a filter of ridiculous stereotyping, like this:
It’s pure fantasy to imagine trans women as conceptualizing women in such terms, or rigidly/universally exhibiting such gender-associated “high femme” tchotchkes as high heels and pink lipstick, just as it would be to view cis women in this way.
Again, this is indicative of a total disconnection from the real lives of and diversity of trans people themselves, in favour of wallowing in mythology.
These stereotypes of trans women are, of course, seen and heard over and over and over again in media representations of trans people — they provide the visual shorthand for “transition” that is made salient by its constant reiteration.³
But that’s “shark attack” storytelling, not quotidian reality.
In fact, trans identity has to be extremely resilient to persist in the face of all the obstacles put in its way — which frequently include decades of disaffirmation and/or active suppression of self-expression. It’s therefore fairly unsurprising that research suggests that clothing choices are more important to the self-image of cisgender people than to transgender people:
Ubiquitously, gender is attributed to a person depending on how they make choices within a cultural matrix that is pervasively gendered. But those third-party attributions do not bestow identity upon us; choices about self-expression are not what make any of us have a gender identity.⁴
Comic Reversal
It becomes crystal clear that “reinforcement” arguments are constructed by working backwards from the desired conclusion when one encounters the inverse notion that gender non-conforming trans people also, by dint of existence, “reinforce” gender stereotypes.
(Obviously, a pair of identical twins, cis and trans people who are gender non-conforming, is again going to leave the “reinforcement of gender stereotypes” completely Schrödingered here).
Here’s an example of this argument in a passage from “Pronouns” by the philosopher Alex Byrne (a piece of writing thoroughly deprecated in this previous article). He’s talking about the use of singular “they” to refer to non-binary people:
Strip away the meandering verbiage, and it becomes clear that the previous logic is inverted here: in this argument, if some people undermine a stereotype, this actually reinforces the stereotype — by somehow forcing other people to comply to it.
But there isn’t a fixed supply of “gender stereotype” that has to be doled between specific pronoun users: again, this assumes a kind of mathematical view of how stereotyping works, in this case as though we are thinking about evaporating water from a salt solution to make it more concentrated. But we’ve already noted that psychological salience does not emerge in this mechanistic way.
But Byrne is not alone in thinking this a convincing line of thought. Similar topsy-turvy reasoning is frequently put forward to attack non-binary people on the basis that their very existence actually strengthens gender stereotypes:
So, the state of being non-binary is inherently problematical — sexist even — because it “positions gender conformity as the norm”, in sharp contrast to, er, people conforming to gender norms (or enforcing them, or believing in stereotypes). Gender conformity is apparently a lobster pot from which no one trans or non-binary may escape.
It’s an argument that the collapse of a wall serves to strengthen a building, because only the more robust parts of it will remain standing: that challenging stereotypes reinforces them, because it becomes more obvious that there are cases where the stereotype is accurate. That’s not how either buildings or stereotypes work.
It’s rhetorical slapstick, the dialectical equivalent of a custard pie in the face.
There’s a companion pie(ce) intended to challenge the very validity of non-binary existence: “aren’t we all gender non-conforming?”.
This question, or the parallel, “What’s the difference between being non-binary and just having a personality?” shows once again that fundamental Trans 101 fail, a primordial confusion between gender expression and gender identity.⁶
Being “gender non-conforming” is very different from having/not having an identity as a man or a woman or as non-binary. I’ve already pointed out that non-binary people can express themselves however they like without this undercutting their identity in any way — an idea that boils down to the slogan, “non-binary people don’t owe you androgyny”.
It’s not even controversial that — of course — no one conforms 100% to the parameters of gender stereotypes, just as real life is not faithfully reiterated in the caricatures of farce. Everyone has a personality: thinking that it must be shaped or constrained by sex/gender is a personal hangup, not a successful “gotcha” that can be weaponized to delegitimize identity.
Anyone can deviate from “gender norms” — there’s nothing stopping you except social disapproval (although this may manifest in diverse ways such as overt abuse or violence or legal prohibition, so caveat emptor).
Just as with trans identity, no one is saying you have a non-binary identity because of how you express yourself.
“It makes me no less female because I don’t conform wholly to a gender stereotype” is the definition of a truly non-existent problem, a conundrum that exists solely in the confines of tragically constrained imaginations.⁷
A Quantum Of Bollocks
The farcical reversability of “reinforcement” arguments is clearly laid out through juxtaposing their variants: identical arguments lead to inverse conclusions (depending on whether we’re looking at cisgender people or not), and inverse arguments lead to identical conclusions (likewise).
This is incoherence, not decoherence: pretzel logic that exists solely for post hoc rationalization of pre-existing loathing.
The different variations on “reinforcement” don’t have to fit together as part of a consistent, coherent worldview — the important thing is that whatever choices in self-expression trans and non-binary people make, an argument for their condemnation can be improvised on this basis.⁸
The common theme linking all of these arguments is a piously expressed horror of stereotypes deployed while blindly, and ironically, making liberal use of crude stereotypes of trans and non-binary people. In counterpoint is a failure to understand the nature of stereotyping itself, as storytelling that persists regardless of the presence or absence of confirming evidence.
Ultimately, these arguments are a version of the fallacy of an appeal to nature, one in which “reinforcing stereotypes” is a proxy for “being unnatural”. A slightly dressed up queerphobia, cloaked in faux feminism.
Footnotes
[1]
The idea that labels allow for “gender superposition” to be collapsed is more generally problematic, in that it’s unclear at what point a definitive collapse could occur for any person. This is simply because such labels are mutable, meaning how “gender caustic” someone’s activity is could require revising at any point.
Quentin Crisp, long taken as the ne plus ultra of non-conformity, asserted transgender identity at the age of 90.
Eddie Izzard has enraged transphobes by a scarcely surprising coming-out as trans.
And a multiplicity of drag artists have come out as trans in the course of Drag Race, which might be regarded as part of a more general counterthrust to lazy assumptions about drag and gender (see also: cis women who are drag artists, such as Victoria Scone, people whose very existence appears to utterly bamboozle some extremely uptight people).
[2]
An attempt to mitigate the problem of Schrödinger’s drag might be to claim that drag, specifically, is in some sense always “gender caustic”, because it always consciously amplifies and parodies gender tropes.
But “deamped” gender expression works equally well to show that we should be considering traits in themselves, not who exhibits them: a set of identical twins comprised of a cis crossdressing man and a trans woman, for example, would equally Schrödingerify gender.
[3]
For more on the ubiquity of this trope about trans women, read Julia Serano’s essay “Skirt Chasers: Why the Media Depicts the Trans Revolution in Lipstick and Heels”, particularly the “Femme Fascination” section. (Then move on to the whole of Whipping Girl).
[4]
Trans people are (in theory) completely free to choose how they express themselves. Except for, ironically, the imposed gender-normative gatekeeping that trans people had/have to perform for the benefit of cis people in order to access healthcare.
Those scripts are where the myth of the transsexual that follows societal norms originates: the inoffensive “old school transsexual” that anti-trans voices love to refer to, a person that knew their subservient place, living anonymously so as not to cause embarrassment to others through their visibility.
[5]
Not to mention the implicit assumptions that non-binary equates to “outrageously genderfucking presentation” and the idea that traditional pronoun use must necessarily correlate with gender conformity.
[6]
The “isn’t being transgender just personality” argument is sometimes accompanied with a line of attack which is basically: pointing to lists of neogenders and laughing.
This is one of the key lines of Rebecca Reilly-Cooper’s Gender Is Not A Spectrum, for example (an article notable also for its complete failure to understand statistical distribution, as I previously discussed in Three “Gender Critical” Mythologies).
This entirely misses the resistance to classification that “queerness” embodies, and the terminological instability that pervades the entirety of LGBTQ+ history. (Gregory Woods in “Homintern”, for example, describes the “neologizing frenzy” of the late 19th — early 20th century, in which a variety of complex classifications were proposed for different variants of what we now call “homosexuality”; the LGBTQ+ lexicon has remained in constant evolution ever since).
Lists of neogenders show ludic taxonomies which are by turn whimsical, wistful, mocking, wry, capricious, tentative, or guileless; and often even use straightforwardly ironic reflections on the uncertainty and slipperiness of classification.
Noting the existence of these neologisms does not justify a leap to the idea that LGBTQ+ people are not connected through social commonalities and shared experiences which can be labelled through various hypernyms: we are not atomised, isolated individuals.
[7]
A variation on this is the “Tomboy Gambit” in which people assert they would be forcibly made to be trans in the modern day because — for example — they used to be a “tomboy” in their childhood (i.e. climbed trees, preferred short hair, etc.).
This is, of course, completely disconnected from the realities involved in being diagnosed with gender incongruence. It’s just a way of claiming a personal stake in discussions about trans healthcare when you have none.
[8]
The boundaries of “acceptable” GNC presentation are also closely and incessantly policed.
When “gender critical” people talk approvingly about “GNC” undermining of gender stereotypes, they are basically carving out a niche for the (to modern eyes) relatively anodyne gender “transgressions” of pop stars such as Prince or David Bowie, or theatrical vamping like that found in the “Rocky Horror Picture Show”.
Anyone who doesn’t fit into a “1980s Smash Hits” demographic is fair game. From Kathleen Stock advocating for the “collateral damage” of women being hounded out of toilets if they don’t look feminine enough, to the homophobic mobbing of Drag Queen Story Hour UK, hypocritical attacks on gender non-conformity from “gender critical” sources are incessant.
