Tackling gender stereotypes - and then confirming them

One of the women who attracted the most media attention in 2015 was born a man. And not just any man. Bruce Jenner was a college football player who would go on to win the title of “world’s greatest athlete” after claiming gold in the 1976 Olympic decathlon, the notoriously gruelling event that demands mastery of 10 track and field categories.

Very little about Caitlyn Jenner’s story has been typical of transgender experience. Jenner’s personal wealth has afforded her the best possible medical treatment, including “facial feminisation” surgery that cost a reported $70000 (about R1-million). The response from the media to Jenner’s transformation was one of fascination, but by and large it was respectful.

It’s interesting to compare Jenner’s reception with that of Chelsea Manning, the US whistleblower previously known as Bradley Manning. A number of US news outlets have simply refused to acknowledge Manning’s gender transition, persisting in referring to her as Bradley.

Jenner, by contrast, has been showered with mostly supportive media coverage, including the now famous edition of Vanity Fair in which she posed for the cover as a Marilyn Monroe-esque vamp. It was in a TV interview with Diane Sawyer around the same time that Jenner made comments that feminists found disquieting.

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“I am a woman,” Jenner told Sawyer. “I have the soul of a female and my brain is much more female than it is male.”

What does a female soul look like? How is a female brain different from a male brain? This latter question is deeply contested: in a well-received 2010 book called Delusions of Gender, scientist Cordelia Fine argued that claims about biological difference between the brains of men and women are drastically overstated.

But here Jenner was, telling the world that she felt, on some essential level, that her brain had always been “female”. Chelsea Manning followed up with a similar statement on Twitter: now that she was a woman, she wrote, she was “so much more aware of my emotions; much more sensitive emotionally (and physically)”.

It didn’t take long for sceptical op-eds to appear. In June, Elinor Burkett —  an academic and Oscar-winning documentarist — wrote a piece in the New York Times in which she said that she had fought her entire life against these stereotypes about women.

“Suddenly, I find that many of the people I think of as being on my side — people who proudly call themselves progressive and fervently support the human need for self-determination — are buying into the notion that minor differences in male and female brains lead to major forks in the road and that some sort of gendered destiny is encoded in us,” wrote Burkett.

The reason  feminists have fought hard to say that most gender differences are the result of social conditioning  rather than innate biological difference, is not hard to see.

If women are “biologically” more emotional than men,  maybe they can’t be relied upon to serve effectively as judges, for example. If a female brain is “biologically” less technical than a male’s, perhaps women should leave flying planes to men.  

One of the unfortunate and unintended consequences of statements such as  those made by Jenner and Manning is that they reinforce potentially destructive notions of innate gender difference.

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This is why some feminists — who one might consider in other respects natural allies of the transgender movement — have voiced concern this year. Regrettably, they have sometimes done so in deeply offensive and stigmatising ways.

Pioneering feminist Germaine Greer attracted fury in October after suggesting that Caitlyn Jenner had transitioned in order to steal the limelight of the Kardashian women.

Author Julie Bindel was banned from a debate in the same month due to a past piece in which she wrote: “Call me old-fashioned, but I thought the one battle we feminists won fair and square was to convince at least those left of centre that gender roles are made up. They are not real.”

These feminists have been heavily criticised for placing their ideologies ahead of the often traumatic lived experience of transgender individuals.

In 2016, it’s to be hoped that more discussion, more theorising and more civilised debate will foster greater understanding. Perhaps, too, a more articulate spokeswoman for transgender experience than Caitlyn Jenner will succeed in capturing the media’s attention.