Gender is not just an idea we have in our minds– rather it is something we DO.
It lives in our bodies — in our movements, our gestures, our posture. It is a daily performance. It is part of how we organize our physicality, how we relate to the space around us, how we interact with other people, and how we present ourselves.
Judith Butler introduced the notion of gender as “performative”, meaning that the concept of gender itself is constructed through the doing of it. There is no gender outside the behaviors that we think of as gendered – the ways we style our hair and clothe our bodies, the ways we stand and sit, the ways we lift and throw, the ways we gesture and smile, the ways we speak and listen, the ways we walk and run, the ways we exert force and act on the world around us…and the ways our society categorizes these actions as one gender or another. (For more information, see Butler’s book Gender Trouble.)
So, where does all this doing gender come from? We learn as very young children how to perform gender. We model ourselves off of family members and people in our communities. We absorb messages from the images that surround us on TV, billboards, magazine covers, etc. And in most cases, we are told directly by the people around us how to behave appropriately as our assigned gender. Certain behaviors are encouraged and others discouraged. Although more and more, I know friends attempting to raise their children without these gendered codes, nonetheless, society’s gender messages creep in – from other adults, from media, from institutions. And as soon as children are old enough to go to school, they often police each other’s genders, teasing those who do their hair, their clothing, their activity choices, their mannerisms in ways that don’t fit what’s expected of their assigned gender.
What is “assigned gender”? At birth, babies are usually assigned a sex by the doctor or midwife based on visual inspection of their genitals. In the U.S., babies are assigned male or female, and those who are born intersex are usually subjected to surgery and then assigned to one of the two binary categories. Most people assign babies the same gender as sex. So a baby born with a penis will be assigned a male sex and gender and raised as such (until the child is old enough to assert otherwise!)