One of the most well-known icons of masculinity in twentieth-century American culture was Ernest Hemingway, who made a huge show out of his high levels of testosterone, pursuing such interests as big-game hunting, gallivanting to Europe to volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, and other acts of bravado. It’s likely that this came about as a result of what his mother Grace had done when he was quite young. His mother had wanted twins, but she didn’t get them. Instead she got a daughter Marcelline, and then 18 months later, Ernest came along. However, she built a fantasy by dressing up Ernest in Marcelline’s old dresses and other clothes, and then she started buying two sets of outfits and having them walk around in pink dresses and flowery hats, calling them her “sweet Dutch dollies” and telling passers-by that they were her twin daughters. She even held Marcelline back one grade in school so that she and Ernest could be in the same grade – and she called her son “Ernestine” now and then (Winer). So it’s pretty easy to understand why Hemingway had such an agenda about demonstrating his masculinity. This anecdote is just one example of the complexities involved in the formation of gender identities. In most cases, as Judith Lorber argues, “gender construction starts with assignment to a sex category on the basis of what the genitalia look like at birth” (p. 55). Parents use attire so that others will be able to identify the gender of the baby without having to ask; after all, babies tend to look pretty much the same, and it is difficult to make that identification without asking. So boys end up wearing clothes that are in primary colors and feature things like soccer balls, basketballs, construction vehicles and the like on them, while girls end up wearing pastels that have butterflies, angels and similar decorative items. While gender coding is generally pigeonholed into the recesses of the mind for most children until they reach the point of puberty, at which time desires and attractions start to push and pull people into a mating dance that, even in a time when homosexuality and bisexuality are entering a greater period of tolerance, is confusing for all concerned as they start to figure out who they are and whom they like.
In some cases, babies are born with genitalia that do not clearly mark them as members of one gender or another, based on benchmarks for such things as the size of a penis or the vagina. Some babies are born with the genitalia of both men and women in a phenomenon that used to be called a hermaphrodite but now has taken on the preferred medical term of intersexual. The film actress Jamie Lee Curtis is one of the more well-known examples of potentially intersexual people (as she has never addressed questions about this topic and her parents have not either). There has been a rumor that she was born with both and ended up having surgery to correct it (“Jamie Lee Curtis”). The fact that such curiosity would swell up about such a private matter indicates that society has a prurient level of curiosity about sexuality to the degree that when it influences cultural figures, that question can take on a scale that overshadows many of the accomplishments of those figures, which is unfortunate. As Suzanne Kessler has pointed out, “physicians hold an incorrigible belief in and insistence upon female and male as the only ‘natural’ options” for gender (p. 4). This belief is mirrored by wider society, which has such a difficult time dealing with other options that individuals’ gender takes on an interest level in the public eye that it becomes grotesque.
I interviewed five people about their gender identification, and three of them identified as men and the other two as women. Interestingly, when we discussed what made them think of themselves as belonging to that particular gender, they all kind of laughed at me and told me that they had always thought of themselves as that way. One of the men (we’ll refer to him as John Smith to protect anonymity) said, “I remember when I was a little kid, my mom would take my sonogram picture out and show it to her friends. She wouldn’t always talk about seeing the penis and knowing I was a boy, but sometimes she would bring it up” (Personal interview). When I pressed the interviewees a bit further, they all indicated that their genitals were the basis of their sexual identity. None of them thought that a chromosomal test would alter their gender identification, although one of the women replied that she had never even thought about that possibility, so it could be that she would reconsider her gender identity if DNA information came back differently.
What I learned is that the way we are raised to think about ourselves, and our bodies, is the predominant factor in gender identification. We are taught to view genitals as a marker for sexuality, and so we do. In cases where our upbringing pushes against that identification, the outcome can be confusing.
Works Cited
“Jamie Lee Curtis.” Snopes.com. 12 January 2015. Web. 23 January 2016.
Kessler, Susanne. “The Medical Construction of Gender: Case Management of Intersexed Infants.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16(1): 3-26.
Lorber, Judith. “’Night to His Day’: The Social Construction of Gender.” 1994. Web. 23 January 2016.
Smith, John. Personal interview. 19 January 2016.
Winer, Adam. “Why Hemingway Used to Wear Women’s Clothing.” 18 December 2008. Web. 23 January 2016.
