Is Gender Binary?

This morning Christian Taylor published a new post on her blog that got me thinking about how my views on transgenderism are changing. I commented there, but I feel like those comments could be fleshed out a little more, so here goes.

I've been reading and studying more on the subject lately than I have in the past (again, I'm finally approaching my transgenderism as something to be learned from, not something to be ashamed of), and have had some very interesting insights. In a nutshell, the more I learn, the harder time I have seeing gender as a strictly binary thing, either 100% male or 100% female, and not as a complex continuum of thoughts, feelings, desires, and attitudes that shape our perceptions of the world and inform our approach to it. I'm still trying to reconcile that with the LDS church's Proclamation on the Family, which I believe to be inspired of God, and which includes this passage:

All human beings—male and female—are created in the image of God. Each is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and destiny. Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.

I'm trying to exercise some spiritual insight here, and I think maybe terminology is getting in the way a little. Mirriam-Webster defines gender as "the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex". So in the common usage, gender is, indeed, binary, and the Proclamation's usage is consistent with that definition: all God's children are sons or daughters, and this gender is part of their eternal identity.

Now contrast that with a common feminist perspective on gender:

...according to this interpretation, all humans are either male or female; their sex is fixed. But cultures interpret sexed bodies differently and project different norms on those bodies thereby creating feminine and masculine persons.
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This means that genders (women and men) and gendered traits (like being nurturing or ambitious) are the “intended or unintended product[s] of a social practice”

So in this characterization, sex is binary, but gender is most decidedly not! I recently read a really great article about this on the Exponent, an LDS women's magazine. Seriously, go read it, it's fascinating. Here's a snippet:

Furthermore, the behaviors, traits, roles, and expectations of gender are culturally relative. I witnessed this first hand during my dissertation fieldwork in Ghana where men unabashedly hold hands with each other, wear pink, sing soprano, and like hello kitty without any reflection on their masculinity, “machismo,” and/or sexuality. It is also a land where women “provide.” They farm, they own small businesses, they occupy the most prestigious and wealthy positions in the largest outdoor market in the world. The variations continue from culture to culture in what fundamental behaviors are “male” or “female.”
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The obvious socially, culturally, and politically constructed continuum of gender behavior gives me serious doubts about the concept of the “eternal nature of gender” argued in the Proclamation to the Family and subsequent talks. It is implausible and carries the remnants of Americancentrism and 1950′s idealism inapplicable to much of the global membership. Thus, is the theology merely a remnant of our church leaders’ generational and national upbringing? Is it the one and only true gender construction? Or am I missing something?

I think we in the transgender community do a disservice to each other by trying to "categorize" different types of transgenderism (i.e. crossdresser, transsexual, genderqueer, etc). To my mind, it seems like we're accepting the scientific premise that gender is a continuum, and yet we're not quite able to let go of the emotional need for tidy little boxes or labels for people. I think of myself as a transgendered man, and crossdressing is part of the way I express that, but it's not an end unto itself — that's just more like a means of connecting with my feminine side. I've been praying and pondering a lot about this lately, and I'm feeling pretty strongly that my essential sex identity, the sex of my spirit if you will, is male (I know it seems weird to impute a sex to spirits, but work with me here). That said, my gender is a very different matter, and not so easily categorized. My physical and linguistic mannerisms, the way I approach any number of subjects from politics, to my profession, to friendships, to church doctrine, to my marriage and parenthood — I fall all over the male/female spectrum, and I don't think I'm alone in that respect. There are a ton of ways people may express their discomfort or lack of fit with their society-proscribed gender role, and I don't think this necessarily tracks with any incongruences in the genders of our bodies, minds, and spirits.

Please note that I'm not attempting to criticize anyone for understanding these things differently. We all see the world imperfectly, as Paul anciently told the Corinthians:

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
— 1 Corinthians 13:12 KJV

I'd like to think the day is coming (Paul's "then") when we all will know one another the way our Heavenly Father knows us, and the fractal beauty of our infinite gender variations will take our breath away.