There’s more to gender neutrality…
It’s one of those nights when the mind rambles about until a thought latches on and you keep brooding until the urge to get to a conclusion drives you to writing at 1am in the night.
So it started with pink nail polish. I mentioned to a friend that it was out of ordinary for an otherwise seemingly straight man to wear pink nail polish at work. Now I must mention that this friend is as close as family and we have had many a healthy back and forth on various issues. Also the right time to add that this friend is a huge proponent of gender neutrality and equality for both men and women. He once prescribed the best way to test if you’re gender neutral is to compare it to the color of the eye, just as you don’t consider people unequal if they have blue or green eyes, so it should be between men and women. Point well taken.
Well, until today. We had another one of those debates, this time about the pink nail polish. He argued that why should a man wearing pink nail polish be considered out of ordinary when it’s perfectly normal for women to wear jeans. To this I asked to him to do a simple survey out on the street, count how many women he sees in jeans versus how many men he can count wearing pink, heck any, nail polish. I agreed that his premise was sound, that society should not frown upon people breaking gender stereotypes but what’s not common, is still.. uncommon. Like men wearing pink nail polish. And stating that it is out of ordinary.
So this discussion got my mind wandering at night. I started thinking about neutrality as a concept and what it means to me. And no matter how many ways I looked at it, I realized I am most certainly not gender neutral. And really, nor are most of you. Or my friend. Really. At least not the way, I had always thought of it: that men and women should be equal in all respects. Always.
A little about me. I dated my husband for six years before we got married. And we have been blessed with the most unique gift among all, our little daughter who just passed month 19. Wow, she is growing up fast.
The first reason I am not gender neutral and really don’t want a one-size-fits-all-genders world is this: I love my husband, a man. I do see gender when I see him. I’ve never felt that way for a woman. I’m sure a gay person has never felt that way for the opposite sex. Even bisexuals only favor one gender at a time. So there you have it, at our most basic and root layers none of us are gender neutral. And I think the world is better for it.
When we were pregnant, we were super thrilled to be having a baby. Did we have a gender in mind? Heck no! We were having a baby! What could be more amazing than that? I’ll tell you what is more amazing than that: to find out what you are having. Since the day we found out, I could not but imagine my child, my daughter being anything else than who she is. A girl. I got her hairbands before she had hair, and frocks (useless; onesies and rompers are really more practical for a newborn) and we cleaned her right after a diaper change (as parents of newborn girls would know). No gender neutrality for us. No, that doesn’t mean that she didn’t get hammers or dump trucks for toys, wear blue monkey shirts or get dirty in the backyard while vigorously taking off any clips or hairbands that I managed to put on. Is this to say that we would have loved a boy any less? Heck, why is that even a question? And if you’re still waiting on an answer: No. The point is to celebrate who you are, not to stencil the same words for whoever you are.
My point is this: Gender neutrality forces you to treat everyone equally. It forces you to find common ground, diluting differences, dissolving uniquenesses. Which makes it, ironically, a zero sum game. Forces you to not see differences even when they stare at you in the face. For example, a statement like women have empathy might lead a gender neutral person decry that men have empathy too. Sure, men do. But scientific evidence suggests that women have more empathy than men, why should we have to take away from women to add to men’s repertoire? Why does one gender being good at something has to be diluted with equality? I understand that one gender usually gets short changed at the expense of the other and so neutrality is a way to ensure fairness, but there can be more than one way of achieving that.
If we really wanted a diverse world where all of us make progress, we should recognize, celebrate and correct differences. I think the typical gender neutral argument focuses too much on correction, and not so much on recognition and celebration. If we believed that one gender lacks traits that the other has to offer in abundance, that the other could absorb and learn from, we would get to a more balanced world. A Canadian knows a helluva lot more about handling winter conditions than a Moroccan. Indian food is replete with vegetarian options. Women don’t ask for promotions nearly as often as their male counterparts. A father is great for the socio-emotional well being of the child. A mother’s voice has a profound effect on a child. All of these are generalizations. But don’t cliches exist for a reason? Should we insist that the world knows more about winter, the world knows about vegetarian food, the world doesn’t ask for promotion, the world’s mom’s and dad’s have the same exact effect on their boys and girls? If we do, we gain equality but everything else gets lost.
