Scene 8 of Monty Pythons’ Life of Brian features a group called the Peoples’ Front of Judea (not the Judean People’s Front... ‘splitters’) plotting at the coliseum.
Stan, one of the members, reveals he wants to be a woman and to be called Loretta. Why? Because he wants to have babies. Reg, another member confronts that notion.
REG: But you can’t have babies.
LORETTA: Don’t you oppress me.
REG: I’m not oppressing you, Stan. You haven’t got a womb! Where’s the foetus going to gestate?! You going to keep it in a box?!
LORETTA: crying
JUDITH: Here! I-- I’ve got an idea. Suppose you (Reg) agree that he (Stan) can’t actually have babies, not having a womb, which is nobody’s fault, not even the Romans’, but that he can have the right to have babies.
FRANCIS: Good idea, Judith. We shall fight the oppressors for your right to have babies, brother. Sister. Sorry.
REG: What’s the point?
FRANCIS: What?
REG: What’s the point of fighting for his right to have babies when he can’t have babies?!
FRANCIS: It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression.
REG: Symbolic of his struggle against reality.
There is a lot of comedic gold in that exchange, but it also illustrates how times change.
Gender dysphoria, as we now call the distress experienced by persons whose gender identity does not match their assigned birth gender, has been known since before the time in which Life of Brian takes place, which is concurrent with the life of Jesus Christ. The Greek myth Metamorphoses features a woman raised as a man, who falls in love with another woman and is transformed physically into a man prior to marrying.
It would be a couple of millennia before that kind of metamorphosis would be medically attempted. Lili Elbe, whose life was the inspiration for the 2015 hit movie The Danish Girl, was one of, if not the first, genetically male persons to undergo sex reassignment surgery. This took place in Germany in 1931, but she died from complications of her fourth surgery, as is so frequently the case with medical pioneers.
For most of the 20th century, gender dysphoria, along with homosexuality, fetishism and other non-conforming behaviour, was treated as mental illness. In 1980, the year after Life of Brian was released, it went into the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) as gender identity disorder.
When DSM-5 was released in 2013, it had been changed to gender dysphoria and by and large experts no longer consider it mental illness, and society is moving in that direction as well. Over the years, there has been a shift in the conventional wisdom for treatment from attempting to help the patient return to identifying with their birth gender to helping them transition to their preferred gender.
Monty Python’s insensitivity is today politically incorrect, although, I have to admit, I still laugh out loud at that scene.
And, if I am being honest, I still get a bit of a twinge at the concept because on its face, gender seems pretty cut and dried. The vast majority of people have either two x chromosomes (female) or an x and a y (male). And at birth, the vast majority of us have unambiguous sex organs.
And yet, gender is undeniably a social construct, or at least gender roles are, and I am all for breaking down social constructs that serve no purpose or result in ill-purpose.
We are only a handful of generations removed, for example, from a time when being a woman meant you stayed at home, took care of the children, cooked and cleaned. You did not become a doctor, or a lawyer, or a scientist, or an astronaut.
Recently, another challenge to social constructs was in the news again. Rachel Dolezal is a woman whose racial self-identity raised a huge controversy a couple of years ago. Dolezal, who was the branch president of the Spokane, Washington chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), claimed to be black, but her birth parents came forward and told the world she is white. This sparked, and her recent return to the public eye has reignited, a heated debate about cultural misappropriation and even fraud.
If you look at Dolezal’s personal history, she actually has a pretty good case for being culturally black. Unfortunately, she coopted the word transracial to describe herself, which is a misuse of the word. Unlike transgender, which refers to a person’s self-identity, transracial is a pre-existing term that refers to the lived experience of persons adopted into a cultural milieu different from that of their birth. The Sixties Scoop here in Canada comes to mind.
Semantics aside, Dolezal’s case does bring up the much bigger question of race. Can a person who is genetically white identify as black?
Of course she can, because there is nothing genetic about race. At least in the case of gender, if you look at DNA, 999 times out of a thousand, it’s pretty clear whether a person is physically male or female.
Race on the other hand is 100 per cent cultural. A strand of DNA cannot tell you whether a person has dark skin or light skin, because skin tone is just one characteristic in the spectrum of natural human diversity. We should not be debating whether Rachel Dolezal is black or white, we should be debating why we continue to divide ourselves by phenotypical differences when we are all one species.
Both race and gender are social constructs that are all about power and heirarchy.
If we can wrap our minds around that, we will be one step closer to building a truly egalitarian society.
