The Flawed Gospel of Binary Sex

But what do I know? I'm only the fashion historian who wrote the book on pink and blue.

"For anybody who doesn’t know my well-established record on this issue, let me be unequivocally clear: A man is a man, and a woman is a woman. And a man cannot become a woman." 

Michael Johnson, Speaker of the House of Representatives

Let me introduce myself. I am not a scientist or sociologist. I am a fashion historian, and I know a thing or two about sex that Speaker Johnson does not. I’ve spent nearly fifty years studying how clothing is used to signify gender. This has led me to educate myself about related topics ranging from biological sex to gender identity. 

My career began in the 1970s, when unisex fashion was nearing peak popularity. While others were amused or even angered by gender-bending trends, I was fascinated. With a degree in fashion design and a passion for historic dress, I knew that men used to wear lace and high heels and that trousers for women were a recent thing. It was a warm, sunny day in the spring of 1976. I was in grad school, and sitting at the Student Union with a few of my classmates, discussing the horrible sexism of academic departments of history, literature, and art history. All about men. Men, men, men. Ever the contrarian, I pointed out that our history of fashion courses were almost entirely about what women wore, and ignored men. One friend responded, with a derisive laugh, “Who’d want to study men’s clothing? It’s B-O-R-I-N-G!” She had a point. It’s true that men had traded their fancy plumage for dark colors and more conservative tailoring in the early 19th century. At that moment, I decided to find out why, if men are so important, their clothing is so dull. I finished my doctoral thesis a few years later, a two-hundred page tome on the early history of the business suit and what it told us about masculinity. (Short version: men are strongly influenced by ridicule.)

This was at the dawn of modern thinking about sex roles. Feminist theory and women’s studies programs were just establishing a presence on campuses. Even the language used was shifting as “sex role” was being replaced by “gender role”, or just “gender”. Because I was a novice working in a novel field I operated under the two most common assumptions of the time. First, sex was a simple, biological binary, except in rare cases. Intersex conditions were abnormal; babies born with non-standard genitals were surgically “corrected” as early as possible. Most of us knew about adult sex changes as well. Christine Jorgensen and Renée Richards paved the way for Caitlyn Jenner, enduring the lurid attention of tabloids.

As for gender, the common wisdom was clearly in flux, as anyone could see in how we were dressing our children. For centuries, masculinity and femininity were considered innate qualities that children “grew into”, just like adult sexuality. That’s why it was traditional for both male and female babies to wear identical white dresses, and why my father (b. 1921) was so pleased to trade his knickers for long trousers when he turned twelve.  Throughout the twentieth century, evidence was mounting that gender roles were “socially-constructed” and “culturally transmitted”, while still based on the biological binary. Intersex babies should not only be operated on as early as possible, but they should then be taught the matching gender roles. (See also David Reimer for how that turned out.) This belief encouraged the notion that gender identity and gender roles were malleable. (I remain puzzled about why cultural practices are believed to be easy to change.) According to the new gospel of “Free to be You and Me”, children could escape the confinement of traditional gender roles via “unisex child rearing”. Give Jimmy a doll and Susie a truck and put them both in t-shirts and overalls, and in a generation we’d all be liberated and equal. 

I attempted to live by that gospel with my first-born child, a girl. Her wardrobe of brightly colored shirts and corduroys served a dual purpose: allowing for hand-me-downs for possible siblings, and rejecting old-fashioned gender stereotypes. Not only was I lectured by a Toys R Us cashier that my daughter would “grow up confused”, but Maria described “playing Superman and Wonder Woman” at daycare as “Superman goes to work and Wonder Woman stays home”.

By the mid-1980s, enthusiasm for unisex clothing and child rearing was waning. Luvs introduced pink and blue diapers. Prenatal testing allowed expectant parents to jumpstart their gendered consumption, and neutral clothing, toys, and nursery furnishings went out of fashion. This happened despite the growing evidence that gender was decidedly not binary, but on a spectrum, and not at all permanent. I was well aware of this, as a fashion historian. But so were the seventy percent of young women who had described their girlhood selves as “tomboys” in a survey conducted in the early seventies. Gendered clothing is situational; women’s business clothing was - and is - plainer and more structured than dressy styles; men’s leisure clothing allows more pastels and patterns than office wear.. 

But never mind the observable facts. Since 1985, children have learned about gender in a binary, pink and blue world. If they were also raised to interpret the Bible literally, they are likely to justify this world view by quoting scripture: “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” [Genesis 1:27] Personally, I prefer the alternate interpretation of scripture that’s making the viral meme rounds, which raises the possibility of an androgynous deity and a spectrum of human sexual identities. 

Like many of my generation, I believed that unisex clothing was a sign of progress in human culture, of liberation from outmoded notions of sex roles for both women and men. I have watched the ebb and flow of fashion trends with increasing skepticism. Whatever the vicissitudes of gendered fashion mean, it’s not simple. The anti-gay and anti-transgender animosity that has surfaced in the last decade does not feel like progress. Looking for answers, I keep coming back to the relationship between the (supposed) binary nature of biological sex and the complex nature of gender expression as seen in clothing, especially what we mean when we say “unisex”.

“Unisex” is just one of many labels used to signify when something contradicts the binary male-female, masculine-feminine construction. There’s also androgynous, nonbinary, ungendered, gender neutral (or just “neutral”), gender-bending, and no doubt several more being invented as you are reading this. The interesting (and also frustrating) thing about all of these concepts is that they rely on the binary. After all, how can something be resisted or rejected, unless it exists in the first place? 

Rather than reject the binary, consider the possibility of accepting it, but with all of its flaws and caveats. This is what I know about sex, based on the current science. Yes, humans are superficially classifiable as male or female. “Superficially” because sex at birth is determined by how we look on the outside (or in that 20-week sonogram). But some of us are not immediately identifiable as one or the other. One baby in 5,000 is not clearly male or female, requiring a specialist to make the call. If we look beneath the surface, there are hidden aspects of sex (hormones, for example) that also complicate the “truth” of the binary. Adam and Eve notwithstanding, belief in two distinct sexes ignores these facts. (For more factual information about sex, see “Sex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes Is Overly Simplistic” [Scientific American, 2015] ) STUPID PAYWALLS! Seriously, reliable scientific information is everywhere, from the interwebs to your public library. Surely Speaker Johnson has access to a library near his workplace?!

If biological sex is not a duality, how can we justify binarizing (for lack of a better word) sexuality, gender roles or gender identity? Yet we do. If most humans have bodies that fit one stereotype or another, how can we help ourselves? Unisex clothing - even just as it existed between 1965 and 1975 - tells us just how complex gender expression can be. Jeans were “unisex”. Flowered shirts were “unisex”. Dashikis and caftans were “unisex”. Starfleet uniforms were “unisex”. Thong bathing suits were “unisex”. 

Cultures across the globe and throughout human history have dressed in ways that are based on the male-female binary. (There are also cultures that recognize the existence of other variations.) The symbols not only vary; they change over time. The function of these differences is similar, however. They exist to distinguish boys from girls, and men from women. We use pink and blue and other gender codes to teach, reinforce and amplify the binary differences we believe exist, and on which we base our institutional structures. I say “believe” because if strictly binary differences were real, gendered clothing would not exist in such variety, or change so often. Men and women would be so different that we could never be misgendered. Isn’t that what gendered dress codes try to enforce?

What does a fashion historian know about sex and gender? I know sex appears to be a binary, but it is not. I know that the rules of gender expression are culturally formed, socially learned and personally interpreted. I know that Speaker Johnson is wrong, and his lack of understanding - not to mention compassion - is not only wrong, but hurtful and dangerous. 

(Stupidity and malice will be blocked.)