Everyone performs gender. That doesn’t mean everyone’s gender performance is inauthentic; quite the opposite. Gender is something you do, not something you are. While a Hollywood or theatre actor may be praised for an “authentic” performance of a character, this doesn’t mean that the actor literally is that character.
Regardless of personal experience, this doesn’t mean the actor can’t authentically experience the emotions and motivations of the character through the application of their own observations of a character’s circumstances.
The core difference between real-world people and the actor in this analogy is that actors typically willingly step into their roles while we are conditioned into our performances and expected to remain in them.
Gender has always been encompassed within a spectrum, even by those who primarily align with the societal gender binary. Slang terms such as “alpha male,” “beta male,” “femme fatale” and “true Eve” reflect the idea that our actions and appearances are constantly mapped onto cultural archetypes, which then dictate how others are expected to react to us. For example, the qualifications of an “alpha male” according to the internet manosphere typically entail a physically strong, successful male who dominates his female counterparts.
Psychologist and professor Albert Bandura theorized that personal conceptions of one’s gender identity largely stem from childhood; we learn traits and behaviors that society traditionally attributes to the male and female sexes — such as the classic “pink for girls, blue for boys” — through observations and imitations that are then met with either reward or punishment for acting in a particular way. This framework is known as Social Learning Theory.
Across the world, social standards and roles placed on humans based on biological sex are not unanimously consistent and have fluctuated throughout history. For example, high heels were a staple of aristocratic masculinity in 17th-century Europe. This shifted because women wanted to emulate masculine fashion and began to wear them as well. This shift eventually led to high heels becoming an item that is predominantly associated with femininity after it fell out of style with men.
Along with social class, race also heavily impacts how one’s gender expression will be received by broader society; for instance, Black people are often hyper masculinized and Asians are often hyper feminized in racist propaganda and media. These are two of many examples of how the expectations of gender expression are fundamentally impacted by more than biological sex. It is an interplay of a multitude of other things such as race, social class, sexuality, age, physical attractiveness, culture and many others. As such, the confluence of these social vectors demonstrates that gender experience and performance is never monolithic for members of either sex; it has always been a spectrum.
The “Myers’ Psychology Fourth Edition Textbook” said that, “Simply said, your body defines your sex; your mind defines your gender. But your mind’s understanding of gender arises from the interplay between your biology and your experiences.”
The logic of gender essentialism — the theory that suggests men and women have fixed societal roles and innate, distinct behaviors that are inherently determined by biological sex with little to no influence from societal factors — directly contradicts my argument.
However, a research article from the Science Advances peer-reviewed journal titled “10,000 social brains: Sex differentiation in human brain anatomy” concluded through observational studies of human brains under multiple different social circumstances that “Much previous research noted considerable sex overlap in human behavior, brain, and genes . . . Even meta-analyses often conclude sex differences to be unexpectedly small.” This dismantles the notion that biological sex rigidly determines distinct psychological traits. In fact, research from the European Society of Endocrinology found that “hypothalamic responses of both adolescent girls and boys diagnosed with gender dysphoria were more similar to their experienced gender than their birth sex, which supports the hypothesis of a sex-atypical brain differentiation in these individuals.” The fact that some individuals possess neurobiological functions that deviate from the typical neurobiological behaviors of their birth sex disproves that biological sex determines how an individual innately behaves in society.
Societal factors have a larger impact on biological reactions rather than vice versa: “Our quantitative investigation supports the idea that human survival has been optimized toward sex-specific strategies to successfully navigate the social world.” While it’s true that through evolution, humans and many other species adapted sex-specific strategies to survive, these behaviors were only functionally beneficial in an environment where things like hunting were necessary to provide the vital resources–and even then, many cultures allowed females to participate in hunts. Today, we have formed a society where hunting is no longer vital to survival.
When the circumstances of our society evolve, our expectations of human behavior must evolve alongside them. We no longer live in a world dictated by primitive survival tactics, meaning the rigid roles once tied to biological sex have lost any evolutionary utility. Ultimately, because gender is an ever-evolving performance shaped by the intersection of our unique lives, it cannot be contained by a simple binary.
