Recently, a lot of my time has been consumed by interviewing college students for a leadership program. Candidates range from first-year students to juniors, males, females, African Americans, Caucasians, Latinos, Asian Americans, and students of all sexual orientations. It’s a nominally diverse group for a school whose most numerous minority population is Asian American at only 5%.
What I have enjoyed seeing is the diversity in answers to the get-to-know-you questions. One question the applicants have the choice to answer is “what character from TV/film/literature would you change places with and why?” Most answers have played along celebrity lines: men from the Twilight saga, girls from Glee, etc. Earlier this week, however, I had an applicant tell me that she couldn’t pick a celebrity and instead would rather switch places for a day with… a (any) boy.
I was surprised by her answer, not because it wasn’t a valid answer but because she hadn’t gone the celebrity route. She explained herself, roughly paraphrased: “I just think it would be interesting to see things from a guy’s point of view… you know, how he perceives others’ actions, what he thinks about the things I think about, you know.”
I’m not going to lie, my first reaction (that I kept to myself) was “well, what differences would there be? The only difference between you and a boy is your chromosomes and genitalia.” Then I mentally smacked myself. Duh, gender socialization! Of course there would be differences, but I’m not convinced that those differences are innate to one’s being; I believe more strongly that those differences arise from nurture, not nature. A boy will look at a girl (let’s call her the “subject” in this example) dressed in a dress and heels and think one thing and a girl may look at the same girl and think something totally different. It would be gender stereotyping to say that a straight guy would automatically think of the subject’s sexuality and attainability and that a straight girl would look at the subject and think about gender/sex competition. I’m hesitant to even draw these comparisons because of the generalizations they assume. But, to a large degree, I believe that the differences in human thought processing by gender are only so because of how the genders are raised and socialized and not because of the chromosomes you were given.
I also have a hard time buying into the concept of the gender binary and the dichotomy which this candidate assumed. I don’t fault her for assuming the this-or-that nature of gender; let’s be real, she and the majority of the rest of us were raised to believe in gender polarization. But I have a hard time not challenging the assumption that thinking as a male would be completely different from thinking as a female. You are who you are. I’m the same innate being whether I’m in sweats or a dress. I realize that my personal style is hardly a perfect metaphor for the differences in one’s thought if they were to switch genders, but it’s what I’m stuck on right now.
Also food for thought: this piece at Glamour, on one transgendered female’s journey. I wish I knew more about her story — I really wish I could sit down with her and probe her thoughts about thinking (ironic, eh?) — but as best I can from the information given, her way of thinking did not change radically with her hormone therapy and ensuing physical transformation. Maybe my candidate would say that Amy, the young woman featured, is not a “real she” because she was not born with female genitalia. Regardless, I think it’s immensely important to begin thinking of the binary not as such but instead as a continuum.
What are your thoughts on gender-specific patterns of thinking/consciousness?
ShoutOut! James Madison University 