How Our Gender Is Used Against 70% Of Us
Data analysis and a meditation on power, gender, and how transgender rights impact women
In thinking over the topical issues I perused last week I keep drifting back to the issues raised by the UK Supreme Court’s ruling that, legally, a “woman” is someone who was born with female biological parts at birth. This rolls modern law back, closer to the place it first started addressing gender in the twelfth century. I know the dialogue around transgender issues can be divisive politically, and confusing emotionally and medically. I don’t intend to address all these issues in the explorations below. However, I want to dive into how I believe the public dialogue on transgender rights presents us individually with opportunities to understand power and gender more deeply and find personal power in what we learn about ourselves in the process. For the record, I am a cis white woman.
Let me start with an admission. While I fully support transgender rights today, I didn’t always. Even so, I am more conservative than some on how to treat children who experience gender dysphoria. My own journey from judgmental to curious, accepting, and supportive of transgender people has taught me a lot about stereotypes, othering, and why women don’t have as much power as we deserve.
Power, “Othering,” and Gender
I think the headline of the tome written into human history on power and gender would be: Power Wields The Gender Weapon To Maintain Power. Here’s the essence of my argument.
Early in human history, the genders shared power to stay alive. When humans began establishing large population centers about 5,000 years ago, human labor began to generate wealth in the form of property and women became valuable for their ability to create wealth-building laborers. This began the practice whereby men began “othering” all kinds of things to claim everything around them as “theirs,” including women and children. Through such othering, men became more or less powerful as compared to each other. Power created advantage and was thus rather addictive, so they wanted to keep it close, passing it to children they could prove were theirs. Thus, we see some of the foundational and pragmatic drivers in the development of monogamous marriage and restrictions on women’s reproductive rights. As these shifts took place, gender proved a useful classification system to use in building wealth and power for some, but not others. This gender-based classification system became baked into human culture through stories, such as the story of Eve, along with a fundamental rule to keep the power advantage skewed towards men in power: humans who can produce children are valuable primarily as breeders and even more valuable when their breeding capacity is controlled.
Yes, it’s more complicated than this. However, despite the fact that women participated fully in the development of culture, society, and institutions summarized broadly above, to me it boils down to the fact that, early in our history, gender distinctions became a primary path to power — for men. And on this foundational point, little has changed.
When the intersectional dimensions of race as a form of “othering” are layered into today’s situation, we can see that gender remains a predictable indicator of culturally attributed power, with women consistently rating as less powerful than men in their same racial category (see below).
The essential truth this reveals is that when we create more categories for people to fall into, we give those in power ways to increase their power by devaluing others — including men! Powerful people do this by attributing more value to their own characteristics (e.g., abilities, desires, and achievements) than people they perceive as different, or “other,” than themselves.
I’ve been curious about how this might look visually, based on data we have about how different categories of people experience power. Pulling together the data, I created the charts below, which paints a picture of how these dynamics can be measured today. “Attributed power” as measured by financial capacity and health outcomes puts us on a ladder where white men (followed by white women) enjoy the highest levels of power at the top of the ladder. This analysis uses financial measures and health outcomes as proxies for attributed power in the form of economic value and essential/physical levels of well-being.
Sources:
Pay: Bureau of Labor Statistics
Trans Pay: McKinsey
Wealth: St. Louis Federal Reserve
Negative Health Outcomes: VoxEU
The intersectional view above also shows us that while the impact of gender is consistent, at the broadest level, race/ethnicity is a stronger predictor of power than gender alone.
Before we dive into the implications of developments in transgender recognition, it’s worth looking to see if there is any data that attempts to break out financial and health indicators of transgender people in a similar fashion. Do similar distinctions hold true between cis and trans people (“trans” being an othering category as distinct from cis) and gender across cis and trans categories?
A comprehensive 2023 study by the National Library of Medicine gives us some laddering data.
Source: National Library of Medicine 2023
Base data of cis men:
69% likely to have at least 2 times the federal poverty rate
90% likely to have positive mental health
89% likely to have positive physical health
A significant finding in this cis vs. trans data — much like the finding above regarding race/ethnicity — is that the distinction between cis and trans is a bigger predictor of power than the gender dimensions within them. While there are gender-specific distinctions within these categories, the trend of transgender maleness predicting better outcomes is not as consistent as it is race/ethnicity. I have some ideas about why this might be so, but I’m not going to theorize here.
I think the more important point to recognize is that between cis and trans categories, the power differential is still a result of the powerful using a gender-based distinction to gain power over others. The gender-based distinction is not between male and female, but between biological and psychological ability to “prove” one’s gender. Through this lens, powerful (i.e., cis) people try to limit trans people’s psychological agency to choose who they want to be as a way of shoring up their own power.
The Sneetches by Dr. Seuss
My takeaway from all these data is that people in the most powerful position, cis white men in our modern society, use both gender and racial classifications to maintain their power.
Does this benefit all cis white men (which represent 30% of the total population)? No. These are population-level statistics, which means that individual experience is ignored.
Do cis white women benefit? Relative to other race and gender-based categories, yes, we do.
Is this fair to every human’s potential? Absolutely not.
Is understanding this likely to change anything in society? I have no idea, but I am allowing it to change me.
With this analysis as a backdrop to my own experience, let’s explore what transgender identities can teach us about gender and power between human beings in our culture today.
Listening to People Talk About Their Genitals
When I met my first transgender person (circa the aughts), it was someone whom I knew to be a very girly and pretty daughter of a friend of mine — a sometimes babysitter for my kids — who then turned up shorn and clothed as a guy when he graduated high school.
My brain broke.
I couldn’t understand why she would want to be a he, when she had presented as such the perfect girl. Pretty. Smart. Accomplished. Everything I would have wanted at her age. Why would she want to trade all that in and become so….weird?
I couldn’t not look for the girl in the boy’s face and body. I couldn’t help wondering what her — his — body looked like under the boy clothes. Had she — he —wrapped his breasts or surgically gotten rid of them? If not, did he plan to? How big did his breasts used to be? I couldn’t remember… Did — she…he…? — still have a vagina? A uterus? Did he have sex? With what kind of bodies? How did they do it? Did they orgasm? How?
These felt like very natural questions at the time. I didn’t ask them, but I wanted to so badly. If it weren’t for the fact that discussing such personal and intimate topics was so verboten in our society, I probably would have.
Later, another daughter of a friend transitioned, one I knew even better. And I wanted to ask again. But I didn’t, I just lurked on his social feeds and read about the anguish of being so different, and then his anxiety of feeling persecuted by other men and unsafe. Paradoxically, when he “passed” as male due to his facial hair, he felt more powerful than he had as a female, confirming the power structure above. I found this fascinating. The same person felt powerless as a female in ways that he felt powerful and privileged as a male. (And he is not alone.)
I kept lurking and listening, waiting for him to talk about his genitals. About his sex life. But he didn’t. Except when he spoke about them as none of my business (or anyone else’s.)
And that’s when I got it. When I saw my own stereotypes and biases come into full relief.
That’s when I understood that I have no more right to know about someone else’s body or sexual activities and preferences — and their related choices — than they have to know about mine.
Seeing the categories -– and my assumed entitlement – so starkly made me realized I was trying to fit him into the hierarchical power rankings above. My unconscious efforts to situate this man on the power ladders, to assert my privilege, were getting in my way of seeing this person — these people — as people.
I tested this insight later when I met a transgender woman at a happy hour. As we chatted about work-related issues and how her decision to transition complicated her life and career, creating problems for her finding quality healthcare, I asked myself if I would be having different feelings and thoughts about her if I thought about her as a “he,” or if I knew whether she had a penis or a vagina. Looking into her eyes as we talked, I decided that was stupid. She had valuable things to say regardless of her parts. She had power. Her experience taught me a lot about the human condition I don’t get insight into through other means. In that moment, I began to let go of the idea that her physical parts determined her value to me or anyone else. It felt good to not care about that. It expanded my view of humanity and my ability to feel compassion for others.
I know for a fact that choice is power, and my silent efforts to negate the choice trans people make about their identity, or to keep their decisions about their body to themselves, had been my effort to exercise power over them. By “othering” them in my mind, I had believed I had a right to know things that I simply didn’t. Letting that go, choosing to see them for who they actually are allowed me to see their bravery and their vulnerability. It allowed me to be more present for them. It helped me deepen my understanding of who I was, and who I chose to be.
Reflecting on my unrequited quest for intimate knowledge of other people’s bodies, I realized I was falling into the trap of using gender as a weapon, wanting to know where to place them on the ladders. My culturally programmed subconscious wanted to know which stereotype-driven double binds applied to them now that they’d transitioned. Even when I knew it was the wrong thing to do, knowing I was higher up than most on the ladders, I was trying to place these men and women on the hierarchy of human power below me.
Here was my next insight.
Why did I want so badly to find their place on the Ladders of Attributed Human Power? Because knowing my place on the ladders is comforting — even when it’s infuriating. When I know my place, my lizard brain knows where I belong. It knows that I do belong. It knows that people sit below me, giving me privilege that makes me feel safer. My lizard brain knows that people are above me to rail against and feel the deserving underdog to. It gives me purpose, to break down the ladders.
I hate this about myself.
Once I saw this more clearly, I began to wonder if I could get off the ladders, even though I didn’t (and don’t) completely understand what that might look like. I began the quest to reframe the importance of gender in determining the power of humans I come into contact with. To tease out the difference between sexual identity and gender identity for myself and appreciate the nuance these distinctions can add to my own life. To see the impacts of culture through these more subtle lenses.
Learning to See Humans — or Not
I like this part of my journey to better understand myself, gender, sex, and power.
And, I regularly mess it up.
Recently I had an exchange on an anonymous discussion board with several non-binary people. They did not reveal to me whether they were transgender or not. They took issue with the way I used gender terms in trying to explain my position on a feminist discussion point. In our arguments, I thought I was trying to agree with them. They thought I was othering them. I tried to use this point of conflict to learn more and understand better how to connect with them. To be more sensitive to their concerns and life experience. In the end, they othered me, and my quest to understand was left unsatisfied. It didn’t feel good to me in the moment. But on reflection I can appreciate that they were wielding a power in this anonymous space. A power that they find hard to wield in the physical world, when their lack of anonymity is compromised by the way their bodies present them or the genitals they are assumed to have, and by the ways others scrutinize their physicality to try categorizing them onto the hierarchical Ladders of Attributed Human Power.
This exchange helped me see once more how hard it is for me (and most of us) to see each other as human without a gender classification system that easily places us on the Ladders of Attributed Human Power. It gave me insight into other gender-related efforts to reduce bias — and why they may not be working.
Here’s a case in point I’ve struggled to understand for years. Why don’t more organizations that profess to operate by meritocracy, remove gender distinctions (and other “othering” classifications like race and ethnicity) from resume-screening processes?
We know from multiple studies that blind resume reviews reduce bias in commercial hiring. These studies continue to show that when gender, race, ethnic and other bias-triggering information is removed from resumes during screening more women, blacks, browns and ethnically diverse people make it into the hiring process from the beginning. (I’m not aware of an LGBTQIA version of this study, though it’s clear they do experience workplace discrimination.)
I have always struggled to understand why this information doesn’t make every organization rush to remove names and other indications of where people fall on the Ladders of Attributed Human Power from screening processes — a simple step whether the process is automated or manual.
Now, understanding what I’ve shared above, I believe this doesn’t happen, because the biases help maintain the human power hierarchy of the ladders.
The truth, I believe, is that most people’s lizard brains — especially those who have more power than others — don’t want off the Ladders of Attributed Human Power because we all need to know where we belong.
Through this lens, I view the UK Supreme Court’s decision to restrict and narrow the definition of “woman” — as well as efforts in the US (and other places) to roll back rights of transgender humans — as the effort to keep the Ladders of Attributed Human Power firmly in place. To reinforce gender definitions (now expanded from fe/male to cis/trans) as a factor in valuing humans by our differences and maintaining power for some by devaluing others.
I see how narrowing legal definitions of gender – attempting to bludgeon us all into giving people above us on the Ladders of Attributed Human Power the right to know about our bodies – is becoming a new cudgel in the struggle for power. It’s an attempt to give you (if you’re above me) the right to know about my body regardless of my choices. And it’s an effort to give me (if I’m above you) the right to know about yours.
And if the laws are successfully rolled back this will be true regardless of how we view sex and gender as different or the same in cultivating our own identities.
Regarding the impact on those who identify as women (and some who don’t), I see how these legal efforts to narrow the definition of gender to our sexual anatomy set up political entities and their representatives to:
Question a woman’s (or non-conforming man’s) ability to participate in all kinds of activities – everything from recreational physical activity to relieving herself when her body requires it
Potentially demand a strip search of anyone to decide for them whether they’re truly deserving of rights and discriminations that only apply to “women” or “men”
Target women who don’t appear feminine enough (Me? You?) — or men who appear too feminine — for discrimination.
I hate this about society.
Seeing Beyond Gender
So I’ve come to believe that legal and cultural battles over transgender rights are nothing more than the latest effort in the ongoing battle to expand, reinforce or dismantle the Ladders of Attributed Human Power. I like to think someday we can do away with the ladders altogether, but I’ll be honest that I think this will be impossible until we have another system to approximate our relative understanding of power to replace it with. It just seems to be how we work.
Human brains need patterns and categories and classification systems to operate effectively. These categories and classification systems produce bias, and while bias disadvantages us vis a vis each other, these mental dynamics give us a modicum of sanity amidst the overwhelm of being a human on earth.
So if not gender to categorize us, determine our relative value and power, what?
I don’t have an answer for that. But I’m looking for one. Any ideas? Please share.
InPowering Powerful Women,
Dana Theus
Executive Coach
InPowerCoaching.com
P.S. Interested in discussing this or anything else it brings up? Join our InPower Women Mastermind community and add your thoughts to our private chats and Zoom calls (we have one tomorrow - join us!)
Follow me on my YouTube channel, Instagram and LinkedIn, for InPower clips and tips, (2-3 minutes tops) taken from these newsletters, blog posts, client advice, and whatever I’m thinking of.