Can the Gender Default be Transcended?
How do we find our way into a new history, a new connected and appreciative relationship with the earth and with each other? Elizabeth Debold is sure that this path will not be possible without a radical transformation of our gender identities. This is the only way to open the view for a co-creative and life-promoting togetherness.
What is this new story that moves humanity toward a different future than the one we fear? Some say it is just that: a move from fear to love. Charles Eisenstein speaks about the new story being about connectedness, interbeing, in contrast to the old story of separation. Joanna Macy speaks of the Great Turning—which is a transformation from our separation and domination of Earth toward our full interdependence with our sacred planet and each other.
I don’t see how we can speak of new stories without getting our hands dirty with questions about gender. In our new-story culture, how are we, embodied beings, in relation to each other? Do we drop the polarity or sense of opposition between male and female, masculine and feminine? I don’t think that anything less would be a new story. But will that even be possible in the midst of climate chaos?
Can the Gender Default be Transcended?
How do we find our way into a new history, a new connected and appreciative relationship with the earth and with each other? Elizabeth Debold is sure that this path will not be possible without a radical transformation of our gender identities. This is the only way to open the view for a co-creative and life-promoting togetherness.
What is this new story that moves humanity toward a different future than the one we fear? Some say it is just that: a move from fear to love. Charles Eisenstein speaks about the new story being about connectedness, interbeing, in contrast to the old story of separation. Joanna Macy speaks of the Great Turning—which is a transformation from our separation and domination of Earth toward our full interdependence with our sacred planet and each other.
I don’t see how we can speak of new stories without getting our hands dirty with questions about gender. In our new-story culture, how are we, embodied beings, in relation to each other? Do we drop the polarity or sense of opposition between male and female, masculine and feminine? I don’t think that anything less would be a new story. But will that even be possible in the midst of climate chaos?
Old Stories
The old story is so embedded in stale either-or concepts of gender. Many thoughtful people who try to get at the root of the toxic dynamics in the Western relationship to Earth point to capitalism’s exploitative, extractive relationship with the planet. But this practice of extraction contains a rather chilling gender dimension. Earth and Nature have always been “coded” as female. Even the word for “Matter”, which is the stuff of Earth, and the Latin for mother—Mater—share the same root. We humans plunder and extract from matter, from our Mother. From Aristotle through the 17th century, early biologists (and philosophers) believed that human reproduction involved the active, “ensouling” masculine acting upon the passive, cold material of the female. For some feminist scholars in the 1980s, this was clearly a set up that makes woman an object rather than a full human being—an object to use and exploit.
At this point in time, these misconceptions (pardon the pun) around human reproduction have been shattered—at least on a rational level. Yet these powerful archetypes of masculine agency and feminine passivity still grab us. They are so old, so engrained that they feel right, somehow. For many, they form the center of identity as man or woman, which is actually quite disturbing. In fact, philosopher Federica Gregoratto argues that “romantic femicide”—the fact that half of murdered women are killed by a current or former intimate partner—is an extreme response to the gender dichotomy that grants agency and action to the masculine. The threat to identity caused by women’s autonomous agency leads to violence. Needless to say, violence is the most extreme expression of separation. This is the dangerous subplot of the old story.
Gender Default
I worry that the stress and terror of climate chaos will keep pushing us back into this old story. It’s taken humanity tens of thousands of years to reach a certain level of self-awareness and self-invention so that the half of society that mates with men and can bear children is not completely defined by this biological capacity. In the past few decades, so much of the discourse about and by women has focused on reclaiming—wholeness and self-worth as well as superiority and aggression. We’ve now developed technologies that make it possible for women to go into battle alongside men, but we’ve not yet really created the conditions that support men to nurture children. We’re only beginning to find out what men might want to be beyond protecting and providing or controlling and leading. There hasn’t been much time to develop new ways of being human together, beyond the dichotomy of male-female, masculine-feminine, man-woman. Or to figure out what a society would be like if the gender binary wasn’t the foundation of Western culture.
Since the Greeks, Western civilization has been a warrior culture. Our default template around gender at times of danger and existential threat—famine, financial collapse, war—drives us into our biology. Men are stronger; they become warriors. Women give birth; they nurture the next generation. As the emergency and disruption of climate chaos stresses the life system, it will make these old patterns seem like the only option we have. We will be drawn to them.
Michael Braungart, the chemist and environmental activist who co-developed the no-waste “Cradle-to-Cradle” process for industry, noted that humans tend to procreate when under survival stress. When one’s life is in danger, a deep biological imperative to reproduce rises up so that our tribe or kin will live on. Our deep fear response to scarcity triggers these default settings. Humans fall back into the most primitive biological responses—which are powerful as we all know. Women who have felt the “baby urge” in their 30s know how mesmerizing these biological impulses can be. They can feel like destiny.
We haven't had much time to develop new ways of human togetherness beyond the male-female duality.
Even with all of the important conversations about embodiment, an integration of body/mind is more to the point—so that our life impulses aren’t just felt but also interpreted by the intuitive mind. This is a highly developed human capacity that needs to be cultivated further. Since scarcity and existential fear trigger our most basic survival mechanisms and throw us back into archaic gender roles, the development of an inner equanimity and a deeper trust in life become not just a personal spiritual matter. They are a new ground, a transcendent mode of survival for ourselves to continue to be complex and evolving, thinking and feeling, creating and loving, beings in a collapsing world.
Gender Distraction
In light of all this, I worry that the conversation about gender in progressive circles is a distraction. The questions about transpeople in bathrooms, the concerns over pronouns, the triumph of the feminine, the struggle about who or what a woman is (with uterus or without?), and #Metoo have revolutionary implications. They are also provocative questions that many find threatening. They are. Because this isn’t simply about individuals’ identities. Breaking up the male-female dichotomy is a sign that the foundations of the Modern West are collapsing. This could be the end of the old story and the beginning of the new.
To reach the potential that may be underneath these experiments in identity, paradoxically, it calls for progressive culture to drop the focus on identity and identity politics. The near-obsession over the nuances of identity place people in smaller and smaller spaces of understanding. It constantly reinforces separation and division. Saying that, at this point in time, may seem arrogant or clueless. The needle of progress regarding social justice is barely starting to move! However, the questions that come to us from climate crisis cast our identities in a different light. Can this questioning become less about “who am I” and more about “what is human?”
The questions that come to us from climate crisis cast our identities in a different light.
The bubbling confusion and creativity around gender asks for a culture in which dignity and possibility are realities for each human being. One would hope that each human could have a safe and respectful path through life. But with this crisis looming, no one can guarantee who will be safe. This golden moment of gender experimentation may be like Berlin in the 30’s. Right now, the wealthy, individually and through hedge funds, are buying farmland, betting on higher demand for food in the future. Huge numbers of humans live in places that are in danger—Haiti, Bangkok, Florida, the Philippines, North Africa, etc. And the question of climate justice is a real one: so many of the world’s poor are in places that are likely to be most affected. What is at stake is so much bigger than anyone’s personal identity.
We have options here, critical options. What world can be created now that comes to us from the future we long for? Can we trust the miraculous power that brought the universe this far? There is an urgency pulsing in the heart of so many of us. This is not a panic, but an urgency that calls us to meet each other in the unknowable depth that drives creation. It strips away our particular identities and invites us to stretch to align ourselves with the impulse of LIFE that is the essence of all matter. In some way, this is all that matters.
