Rhetoric’s slipperiness stems in part from its casual attitude toward all sides. It shares this quality with queerness and other forms of nonduality. Some of those other forms aim to cultivate or dwell in the indefinite. Rhetoric is strange among these forms. The indefinite is its base state and yet it has a talent for heightening distinctions between things just as well as it can dissolve them. Rhetoric has a knack for generating explanations for phenomena when accepted narratives become disrupted or insufficient. While we tap rhetoric’s sense-making talent continuously, we rarely plumb the depths of it because it is hard to dwell in the indefinite. We prefer that rhetoric simply make sense of things for us, and it does. It provides, for instance, categories that can be made definitive and it clarifies relationships. Take for example the notion of cis and trans genders, which resolves the tyranny of male and female gender assignments by establishing a different basis for organizing gender identity. The concepts of cis and trans organizes gender in a way that explains, e.g., two people born with similar organic features where one identifies as feminine (cis) when the other does not (trans).
Rhetoric is adept at introducing novel associations and resolving incompatibilities by generating dissociation. It does this without concern for how the dust will settle but don’t confuse it for your change agent. Rhetoric’s designs more often than not fold back into an uncanny affirmation of the status quo. Notice, for instance, how happy it makes some people to declare themselves cis gender with determined confidence. “Look at me,” they say with breezy affect, “so secure in this new dichotomy where you can be you and I can remain me without upset to anyone other than the timid and troglodyte!”
Rhetoric, a sense-making device, is as indifferent to that smug stability as it is available (theoretically) to its antagonist. That is where rhetoric differs from a queer form of nondualism, which is never indifferent to gender and that deliberately aims to unsettle gender dichotomies be they arranged around male female or cis trans.
This project, Io Loves Koko, a slow rolling rhetorical queer handbook & house of fashion, aims to pair those energies. Indifferent and deliberate - a pairing that is neither a program nor dichotomous, neither a cancellation nor a complement but a pairing nonetheless, a paradox perhaps, because it is hard to dwell indefinitely in the indefinite and maybe not altogether desirable.
Indifferent and deliberate form a nondualistic pairing of energies with which to greet assignments, that key element of gender that the notions of cis and trans helpfully questioned before further erasing. The question, you’ll recall, went something like, “is it a good idea to assign everyone at birth, based on certain features, either feminine or masculine roles and then insist that they stay in those roles the entire course of their lives?” It was a very good question. But then what was the answer? Was it, “no, because now we understand that gender identity just flows naturally through us?” Was it, “no, and [bizarrely] that means more gender-affirming healthcare though still no funding for menopause research?” Was it, “yes, but in a less heteronormative, more liberal, you-do-you way?” Was it, “no of course not and some people have figured that out and rejected their assignments and others have also figured that out and, while they haven’t rejected their assignments, they recognize that it is something that happens and is perfectly okay to do?”
You see our point, maybe. The most prominent answers over-rotate on liberation from assignments as if the assignments served no purpose beyond arbitrary subjugation of personal expression.
It is true that the justifications for gender assignments at birth are dreadful and it is also true that all the subsequent gendering of assignments that follows, e.g., who pays the bills and who soothes and who cleans what, are more distracting than helpful. But the current arguments about gender identification no longer engage the problems with gender assignments or gendered assignments. The problems once again feel reified or at least lost in the whirl of a backlash. People are focused on whether transgender is a real thing, asserting the question by way of another rhetorical dissociation, the one that distinguishes real from unreal. This commonplace likely feels familiar (is climate change real?; was it really rape?). The real unreal dissociation refuses, denies, erases, and stalls indefinitely. It obstructs any other way into a topic including and especially ways that might allow for complexities to take root. In this case the argument eclipses other questions about gender assignments, setting us once again adrift from the related matter of how else, other than at-birth gender assignments, we might organize household chores and childcare and public facilities and healthcare and sports and leadership and our interior lives.
In an attempt to get back to that question, here is one more “no” argument against at-birth gender assignments, although we wish to place a large bold * on it. The argument is this: gender is most potent as a fluid state where it becomes available for multiple uses.* Before we get to the *, allow us to underscore that, for us, answering “no” is less a matter of democratizing gender identification than a matter of repurposing a massive schema. So, yes, by all means identify with femininity and masculinity, with femininity or masculinity but know that gender’s organizing function becomes more interesting where we keep an eye on the assignments and recognize the weight of them; where we recognize the effort it takes to inhabit and sustain a gender while completing various life assignments be they externally given or self imposed. It cannot be overstated how difficult it is, for example, to give birth with masculinity or to be credible with femininity. Just try speaking or listening while identifying as either. All of it is made difficult by the combination of having every assignment gendered and each of us trying to maintain a coherent sense of our selves. Completing (gendered) assignments with any coherent sense of (gender) self is just really difficult, which may explain why it remains so popular to only pair masculine people with masculine assignments and feminine people with feminine assignments despite good evidence that it is an unworkable approach to life.
The liberatory approach to gender assignments tends to minimize the difficulties. Where self-liberation becomes the organizing principle, gender can seem a superficial style that you can swap out as easily as switching from solids to patterns. Breezy variations on “gender fluidity” encourage everyone to be masculine in the boardroom and feminine in the kitchen, or else to re-make all the assignments gender-neutral so that everyone can be whatever they want while doing whatever they want because now we value a feminine style of corporate leadership and a masculine style of cooking. This is as good a place as any for a too brief mention of gender’s inextricable relationship to race, the historical availability of femininity and masculinity, and what Christina Sharpe refers to as the anagrammatical form that gender takes where paired with Blackness. The dream of frictionless gender fluidity imagines gender as an accessory in an autonomous self that was forged in and through various exploitative conquering projects.
*The liberatory approach to gender expression skates past that history and the deeper purpose that gender serves in crafting its related assignments, none of which are innate by the way. The TERFs really don’t do themselves any favors on this point when they claim their assignments as exclusive, but neither does the character Reese in Torrey Peters’ popular novel when she does the same thing and in ways that smack of misogyny. If anything, this antagonistic gatekeeping brings into focus the ways in which stale disturbing gender stereotypes continue to serve as qualifying and disqualifying events. Like, Reese “letting herself” get beat up by her boyfriend…qualifies her? And Caster Semenya’s athletic excellence…disqualifies her?
The extent to which essentialism has crept back into gender identity illustrates how hard it is to maintain a gap between gender and assignments. We seem to be confusing gender’s pull for some inevitable imperative rather than allowing it to be the weight and complexity of gender expression in service to a life assignment—social stability, invention, truth, speed, romance, extractive economies, housekeeping, revolution, parenting, art.
So let us return to that smug person who confidently declares themselves cis and also to that person struggling through a masculine pregnancy. The cis trans dichotomy helps neither work through what gender is doing to us or expands what we could do with it. That may be because we now mainly use the dichotomy to manage what we refer to as personal preferences. To speak of gender as a preference, a practice that admittedly may be limited to the impoverished imagination of the professional class, is to defang its transformation. In any case, the idea of personal preference diminishes the complexity of our collective assignments. Think for a minute about just how flimsy a line personal preference really is. What pronouns do I prefer? What do “I” prefer? Gosh, where to start. I would prefer this meeting have a different agenda. I would prefer not to scrub soap scum off the shower tile today but am going to do it anyway. I would prefer that the man at work who holds organizational power over my job assignments not abuse that power in service to nursing his little personal grievance about how I spoke to him. In the great grand gendered scheme of things, asking which pronouns I prefer feels like the thinnest chump change. Where and when did we settle on preference as the pivotal term? Is it even an option to give as much thought to the pronouns “I” and “we” as now given to she and he? Can we talk about the disappointment that is the singular they?
None of this frustration is a call for gender neutrality. In so far as answering “no” means “gender neutral,” it is the neutral of rhetoric’s indifference, an organizing force that cuts in multiple directions. But rhetoric does not derive its power from its indifference. Like gender, rhetoric’s power consolidates through sustained expression, or “dull repetition.” Rhetoric is indifferent but we are deliberate in our use of it. That is the point of our “no” answer. It is an answer that pairs indifference with the deliberateness of queer life so that we can be both indifferent to people’s gender identities and also more deliberate in our gender expression.
What does it mean to be indifferent to how people identify and also more deliberate in our gender expression? We answer with an illustration.
Performance artist Taylor Mac tells us that Judy is a form queen. What does that mean? It may mean that Judy believes we might learn something about form from a feminine practice of it (oh, a delicious gender assignment at last). Mac has embraced that assignment as a life’s work, and Judy’s excessive, clinquant performances are the yield of Judy’s deliberate, careful fulfillment of that assignment. It is repetitive work, though in Mac’s case hardly dull. Why does it matter to the assignment, you might ask, how Judy identifies? We wish please to rephrase the question: How does it matter? It matters in that the assignment requires committing to femininity in all its parts, even (especially) the despised ones. It is hard to appreciate that work if we are only indifferent to gender identity. For instance, sustaining the assignment requires Judy to be credible and here is where things get interesting for everyone. Here is where the significance of gender reassignment becomes apparent; where the question of form becomes so crucial. How do you achieve credibility in a feminine form? It feels impossible because credibility requires qualities that femininity lacks by definition. “Organic,” cis expressions of femininity lack credibility most of all, as illustrated by Reese’s reactions to the other women in her women’s group. To be feminine is, by definition, to be brainless, and so femininity appears the more effortless it seems. This condition presents a predicament, by the way, when everyone is asked to state their pronouns. The sense of a trap may be the reason that exercise so often fails to queer the space. A desire to avoid entrapment may be why some people embrace the cis with such enthusiasm. Willingly identifying as cis at least affords a semblance of consciousness (a little act of resistance). But the predicament is not so easily unwound, which is why it is important to understand that Mac’s answer to the pronoun question is not a joke. It’s deliberate. Judy sees the suspect spectacle that is the feminine as the exact right necessary form for the stories Judy wants to tell. It’s not that the stories are “her” stories. Its that they can only be told while inhabiting that Unfaithful Meretricious Overwrought Discredited form that some how, impossibly, turns the vacuous dense. And if we are convinced of femininity’s necessity in this case, if Judy succeeds, then we come away with the queer possibility that we may really need the feminine and people who know how to occupy it. That is to say, we may need to accept some sticky gender assignments.