Zero Point

It sticks like glue to the floor, the ceiling and the streets. It’s what surrounds us every time and everywhere and still we can’t see it. It’s not the matrix to be precise – but it would really fit that concept. It’s gender.

Let’s just stay with that matrix metaphor for a little longer. Every phenomenon we encounter can be mathematically described – well, at least it could if we were smart enough to do so. But what about gender?
Well, here we face trouble pretty soon. First of all this not all too big word has according to some dictionary not one single or exact definition. Many people – including me sometimes – use the wide term “gender” to refer to “gender identity” which would be as what or who we identify. On the other hand many (or even more?) use gender as the word that says as how others see you. And we’re back with the usual me-and-them thingy. We’ll get back to it later here and in another post because for the first time being the following thoughts can be applied to both views.
Right, first there was math. When we understand gender as including male and female entities we should ask ourselves what exactly these entities are, where they intersect and how much they do so. Remember, we’re still two-dimensional so far. I hope you remember statistics and set theory from your math classes, because we are going to use this now a bit – gee, I hate math!

Because simple math doesn’t always really work with everyday facts we need some assumptions to build on (we could also use more complex math here but that would be a bit off limits for the author).
First, we assume that there is a way to measure gender attributes of a certain behavior on some scale, giving either masculine or feminine points (to simplify you can compare this concept to a BEM Sex Role Inventory test[1]) and that the measures are given.
Second, we assume that we are somehow able to sum all existing attributes of a person up to an average.
Third, we assume that we are able to do this for all people in the world (or at least the Eurocentric part of it, ’cause most of us know the western society best).
And fourth, we assume that gender is static so we can have some data which is still valid after we collected it.

Now we have the ability to draw nice little diagrams to show how male and female we really are – may it be how we feel or how people perceive us. Well, there’s one flaw. Neither of the four assumptions above is really possible so it won’t work anyway. However, if we assume for a second they were it would be really interesting how the diagram would look like. A large pool around male and female and few in the middle? Or rather an ellipse with most in the middle and least in the outer region? Fine, we don’t know for sure – all we can do is watch or ask randomly people and take notes. However, I think we just proved that gender is too complex for math so far.

Fine, you may think now, why did she do such a bunch of talking when she just ends up with a simple one-sentence conclusion? We simply need a logic evidence to prove that something doesn’t work and that’s what I did now. Taking a gender role test doesn’t tell you as much as you might think.

During the work on this article, I took the BEM test for the third time in my life. The first one was about the time I came out – I was labeled clearly feminine with a really high ranking. The next time was after I started on hormones. I still was considered feminine, but pretty close now to nearly feminine. Now I did it today and I was only four points towards the feminine in the androgynous scale. Hell yeah, I hit zero!

What do we learn from this? Well sure, these tests also assign male or female attributes to things I wouldn’t consider male or female except when we speak of stereotypes. And I wouldn’t really say that for a pragmatic person a stereotype is something worth to accomplish. So when you happen to be in your current life situation more of a stereotype than usual, you just get coincidentally more feminine or masculine.
But there it comes, the really thrilling question – is there a Zero Point? Is there some place where you either have no gender at all or equal amounts of both (if there only were two). And is there something similar with sex?

If there were something like a Zero Point of sex in the way it’s perceived by others, I probably would have crossed it during the last few years. But if there would be a Zero Point of gender I played quite some time with it without ever really hitting it.

We can’t measure such a thing. And we often tend to forget that something as complex and often rethought and hard-fought as gender cannot possibly have two dimensions. There are way too many personal elements that intersect in too many places to avoid ending up in a multidimensional construct which we can’t just fill in bottles and sell on the black market. Male and female isn’t even nearly enough to be the only parts of gender.
But once again back to our famous number zero. How such something that complex which we cannot measure actually have a Zero Point? But I can promise you one thing – if there actually were a Zero Point, I’ll find it someday – but I’d rather say that we all have one point in this matrix – and we call that point ourselves.

[1]: To take the test, you can download it here.

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~ by Liz on April 25, 2010.