Sex and Gender: Why Killermann et al. View the Traditional Gender Binary as “Sick”
In his TedX talk, Sam Killermann explains that sexuality and gender are two different things: “one does not dictate the other,” he says. Instead, gender is something that is culturally articulated to boys and girls from an early age onwards: boys are taught to be rough and tumble, aggressive, to “like the color blue,” as Killlermann adds. While girls are taught to “play house” and to let the boys take charge. In other words, these are stereotypes that are culturally perpetuated according to Killermann and others—like Katie Rogers, who notes that “when Corey Cogdell-Unrein of the U.S. Olympic team won a bronze medal in women’s trap shooting,” a major American newspaper described her only as the wife of a Chicago Bears football player. Her identity was informed by her male companion in her life—i.e., her gender identity according to the newspaper was dictated by the stereotypical approach to gender as identified by Killermann. Killermann goes on to add that gender identity is much more fluid in the real world than it is in the concepts that arbitrarily presented to young persons in school: in the real world, girls can be rough and tumble, like the color blue, and want to play sports and take a leadership role, while boys can like to play house, be more reserved, and less inclined to make decisions for others....
Killermann’s point is that there is no either/or when it comes to gender identity in the real world. Judith Lorber makes essentially the same argument as Killermann, when she states that “gender, like culture, is a human production” and “is constantly created and re-created out of human interaction” (54). Nonetheless, gender stereotypes, biases and even discrimination (for example, in the workplace where four out of ten women “say they have experienced some form of gender discrimination at work” according to John Gramlich) continue to persist in society. And that is why Killermann et all view the traditional gender binary as “sick”: it reflects, according to their perspective, an unreal gender identity that is used to perpetuate an old world order.
The main problem for Killermann et al. with the concept of gender being “binary”—that is, one is either masculine or feminine, which is stipulated according to one’s biological sex—is that the concept is narrow and does not explain why boys and girls, men and women, often display tendencies and characteristics that do not fit or align with the traditional binary gender norms. For example, a boy could easily want to play with dolls, while a girl could easily want to play with balls, sticks, dirt and rocks. A man may like sentimental films while a woman could prefer action movies. A man might just as easily want to be a follower as he might want to be a leader—and the…
