Boys will be Girls?

No coffee necessary--my morning Sociology of Gender class definitely kept me awake this morning. We watched a documentary on the oft-studied island of Samoa, located east of Australia. Paradise Bent: Boys will be Girls in Samoa followed numerous Samoan individuals who called themselves Fa’afafines: literally meaning “in the manner of a women,” they are males who are socially female. Many act and dress with feminine characteristics, but the common denominator lies in their performing traditional women’s roles, like cooking, sewing and cleaning the house.
Consider assets in a family, Fa’afafines are accepted in the community and are viewed as women, whether or not they fully look like women. In fact, none of those in the video bothered with a sex change, feeling no need to biologically ‘prove’ themselves as females. Cindy, a Fa’afafine dancer, was happily dating an Australian guy working in Samoa for the Australian High Commission. When the Commission became nervous about his relationship with Cindy, he was transferred back to Australia. The video concluded with a triumphant caption that the man had quit his job and gone back to Samoa to live with Cindy.
Many Fa’afafines maintain they do not fit under “gay,” “transsexual,” or “bisexual” labels that Western society uses. In fact, one Fa’afafine perceived the difference, commenting that Western analysis of exactly “what you are” was a threat to her, and for that reason she would not leave Samoa. In her country, she was a female, and that was that.
The Fa’afafine example is only one among many confirming the limits of our Western conception of two genders, or “opposite sexes.” Arguably, Samoa still only has two genders: male and female. And they don’t have a gay community. But the bottom line remains: compare our society and Samoa’s, and it already becomes clear that there is a wider range of gender conception than our two easy biological categories can account for. Yet the male-female dichotomy continues to be the reality in our society: you are either male or female. You can’t be both; you can’t be in-between; you can’t be neither one nor the other. Of course, challenges to gender categories continue to surface, whether from the LGBT community or from heterosexuals themselves. Not only are these communities redefining gender, but so is the growing Asexual Movement in North America. Self-proclaimed asexuals are people who want meaningful emotional relationships, but they just don’t want sex. In a highly sexualized culture, this is a challenge to our strict biological categorizations: they make biology less relevant. Not surprisingly, psychologists and sexperts consistently dismiss these people as unnatural, and/or as having a disorder.
Artist Andrea Zittel once said that no matter how many options, humans have a tendency to reduce things to two categories. Despite the sweeping redefinitions of gender that have occurred in the last 30 years, our society is still resistant to many cases that don’t fall neatly under the labels ‘male’ or ‘female.’ Today’s reality sees thousands of people feeling uncomfortable with these easy labels, sensing there is something missing in these socially-defining markers. But today’s reality may be tomorrow’s outdated paradigm. If our ideas continue to evolve as quickly as they have in the past few decades, who knows what is to come?