What does it mean to be a woman anyway?

In a panel discussion this week on gender identity and feminism, I was challenged to rethink some beliefs about my own identity as a cis-straight female.

How are you doing today?

I’m okay, thanks. You know, given the state of the world….

In English, we can have that everyday conversation with another person without giving one passing thought to our respective genders. We can use the same words for “you” and “me” whether we or the person we are chatting with identifies as male, female, non-binary, or something else. It doesn’t matter. We are all the same. Linguistically speaking.

But in some languages, that is impossible. Take Hebrew, for example, that language in which I live my daily life here in Israel. I cannot say, “How are you?” without first determining whether the person I am talking to is a male — in which case, I’ll ask ma shlomcha — or female —in which I’ll ask ma shlomech. There is no in-between option, and no way around this. Without a gender-neutral word for “you”, I have to make that judgment about the other person before I even open my mouth to speak.

The absence of a gender-neutral option in language raises a lot of questions. If there is no gender-neutral form, can a non-binary person exist in that culture? How do you speak to a person is not easily “labeled” — or who doesn’t want to be labeled? And, by the way, why is gender-labeling such an obstinate practice in so many cultures, so that there is no way to even say “baby” without determining boy-baby (tinok) or girl baby (tinoket)? Why is gender more important than any other identifying feature from the time a human being is born?

Mostly, though, the absence of gender-neutral language raises this challenge: If there is no name for a thing in a language, do people speaking that language know that it even exists? Is it possible for a thing to exist in one’s mind if there is no available word for it? Is there a place for us to be just human, without having to be male or female?

*****

The Inuit people famously have 50 words for snow. This factoid has been used to demonstrate a very important function of language: Words enable us to see. If we don’t have a word for a thing, we are unlikely to recognize that it exists. As Audre Lorde said, “Give name to the nameless so it can be thought.” Language doesn’t just describe reality; it creates reality.

This may sound counterintuitive, but linguists have long been fascinated with how this works. In languages in which there is no word for “rectangle”, for example, its speakers will have a hard time recognizing that shape. In languages that have only one word for both blue and green, its speakers do not always see these as separate colors. By contrast, in Hebrew, light blue is not a shade of blue (kachol) but rather its own color (tchelet), a fact that often gets me into trouble when I ask for the person across from me to hand me something blue, but the person does not see anything blue because the thing I’m pointing to is not blue but tchelet. Words define not only what people are capable of seeing but also what they don’t see.

Language also defines emotions, and may give names to feelings that people might not recognize. Hebrew does not have a word for “resentment,” and it can be hard to explain. Many languages have other unique feeling words — such as aware, a Japanese word signifying the bittersweetness of a brief, fading moment of transcendent beauty; Or Dadirri, an Australian Aboriginal word signifying a deep, spiritual act of reflective and respectful listening. Or Feierabend, a German word for the festive mood at the end of a working day. If Americans had an equivalent word for Feierabend, would Americans be less workaholic and more eager to actually call it a day at some point? We can only wonder.

Interestingly, there are a few Hebrew words that are difficult to translate, such as firgun — the act of purposefully complimenting another person in order to lift them up; davka — a kind of cross between “precisely” and “ironically” used to aggressively emphasize a point; and agunah — a chained woman, a woman stuck in an unwanted marriage.

Agunah is a case in point: If a word doesn’t exist in a language, maybe the object that it is pointing to doesn’t exist in that culture. We should take as a mark of shame that the word agunah exists in our language at all.

For decades, anthropologists believed that if a word didn’t exist in one’s language, the people speaking that language would be completely unable to even conceive of it. But turns out, that’s not exactly true. People are capable of thinking beyond what their language allows for. For example, there are many languages in the world that do not have words for “right”, “left”, “in front”, or “behind”. Instead, they reference everything by the global directions of north, south, east, and west. But research has shown that speakers of these languages can perceive of in front and behind. There is nothing wrong with their brains, and language does not cause permanent incapacity that way. However, the have to be taught. They need new words. People who are never exposed to concepts of right and left will not know that they have the option to say “turn left” instead of “turn east”. And they may not realize, until they are exposed to that thought in words, that they can in fact be at the center of their own universe.

I find that fascinating. Our language constructs our reality, and our understandings about what is and what isn’t.

******

So what is the gender of a table?

Many languages unlike English assign gender to objects. In Hebrew, a book is masculine but a notebook is feminine. A chair (kise) is masculine, but a big cozy chair (kursa) is feminine. This may strike native English speakers as interesting quirks (unless you’re trying to learn Hebrew, in which case they are major annoyances and one of the most common mistakes that Anglos make in Hebrew, which in turn become embarrassments, even for those of us who have been living here a long time and can write an academic thesis in Hebrew while still occasionally mixing up male and female in everyday speech because our brains forget that everything that comes out of your mouth has to be gendered, so even if you’re discussion your post-graduate research, if you refer to a man in a female form, the room will chuckle and remind you that you will never stop being a new immigrant. But I digress.)

The gendering of everyday objects is actually more than a quirk. It often has a strangely powerful impact on how we perceive the world.

Guy Deutscher, an Israeli linguist, has studied how the gendering of objects impacts the way people perceive them. He found that in languages that assign genders to objects (eg, French, Spanish, German, Hebrew…) people will assign that object with qualities that its gender is associated with. So, for example, if the noun "table" is feminine in a language, people will call it "pretty" or "dainty", whereas if a table is masculine, people will associate it with being "strong" or "sturdy", etc. People subconsciously apply their perceptions of correct masculinity and femininity to objects according to the gender of those objects. Which also tells us a lot about what people consider to be a “correct” female or a “correct” male.

In other words, the very fact of having to think about gender non-stop in everyday conversations reinforces binary thinking about our genders — that there are only two ways of being in the world, male or female, and that each one has a collection of assigned, assumed qualities.

This is problematic for so many reasons. It can be awkward, presumptuous, or obnoxious to be tasked with assuming gender. It also forces us all into boxes — even putting our stuff into boxes — whether we want it or not. And ultimately, much of the world does not fit well into either of those boxes designated “male” or “female”. I’m not even referring to the 1% of the world who actively assert themselves as neither male nor female (which, as Rabbi Jane Litman pointed out, is still roughly 80 million people, or five times the number of Jews in the world.) I’m saying that even those of us who have been more or less consistent in retaining our assigned gender may still not fit into those gendered assumptions.

I, for one, although have been biologically female my entire life, have never quite conformed to expectations of being culturally female in this world. As a kid, I was never able to do the whole dainty-delicate thing, I rarely paint my nails, I abhor dresses, and at this point in my life I don’t think I would wear heels if my life depended on it. (I tried at my son’s wedding last year, but I stepped out of them during the huppah, where the pair stayed the rest of the evening.) Mostly, I struggle with a whole set of assumptions about modesty, humility, servitude, invisibility, and doormatiness, and the expectation that I take responsibility for the happiness and comfort of everyone around me and think of myself last. I have practiced many of those expected behaviors at different points in my life, and for the most part it has not gone well. When I was a kid, I was so averse to the gender segregation — which is often the expected norm in elementary school, when boys play with boys and girls play with girls and all else gives you cooties — that I did not group with either the boys or the girls, and instead tried to break the whole system by chasing boys around the schoolyard and forcing myself into the groups where I was the most unwelcome. I really did that. I wasn’t chasing boys because I liked them but just because it irritated me that we weren’t supposed to. I would kvetch about how it wasn’t fair that girls and boys weren’t allowed to play with each other. And then I would run. Since I spent my childhood doing anything but sitting still, chasing boys was as good a pastime as any. Eventually, we all got older and these rules changed. I woke up one day and it was suddenly cool to be hanging out with people in the other group who yesterday gave you cooties, and changing one’s behavior in order to davka attract their attention. That quick transition didn’t exactly make any sense to me other, and for the most part was a big nuisance to everyone about all of it. My sisters used to say about me when I was growing up, “Elana doesn’t know how to do anything quietly.” So there it is.

What does gendered language do with people like me? The ones whose labels do not match our behavior? Do we even exist, or are we just strange aberrations? If I didn’t have to think of myself as a girl, and if everyone else around me wasn’t forced to put themselves into either Group A or Group B, how would our lives have been different? How would our self-concepts have been different?

I’ve been thinking about the need for gender-neutral language for a long time, in order to make everyday exchanges less gender-packed and awkward, and also to allow us to let go of gender expectations as the centerpiece of our social interactions. Today, there are a few campaigns to fix this, such as the campaign is to create gender neutral pronouns in Hebrew, or the artist creating fonts that incorporate both male and female conjugations as one unit.

But clearly the problem is much deeper than the language. The language isn’t the problem. The language is merely one symptom.

******

Despite a lifetime of complaining about the gender boxes that our societies put us into, I have never considered that maybe I’m not actually female. That concept has not been in my lexicon or my thinking.

This past Sunday, as part of my online course, Jewish Feminism Reimagined, we heard from a panel of phenomenal speakers on the topic of gender identity, each one with a different story about their gender identity and a unique life of moving and transitioning.

Rabbi Micah Buck-Yael, who was assigned female at birth and born into a feminist household, transitioned to male after rabbinic school, marriage, and becoming a parent. Rabbi Abby Stein, assigned male at birth in a Hassidic family that are direct descendants of the Ba’al Shemtov, is today a transgender woman, model, writer, and speaker, among other things. Rabbi Jane Rachel Litman tried to get into rabbinical school in the 1970s before anyone was letting women in, but that didn’t work. Eventually the Recontructionist Movement accepted her as a kind of experiment, as their first woman rabbi. Rabbi Jane graduated in 1982, although she calls the experiment a failure since she was not entirely accepted by her surroundings. Rabbi Litman’s peers actually put her on trial for being a witch. That actually happened. Nevertheless, she has been a practicing rabbi ever since, and says she is not only non-binary but anti-binary, since she does not believe that human beings are on a gender spectrum any more than we are on any other kind of binary spectrum, like between Jewish and Christian or anything like that. We are all just individuals. And Leah Lax, author of Uncovered, the only memoir about coming at as gay from the Hasidic community, describes herself as queer and believes that all the alphabet labels — LGBTQAI+ — are unnecessary and put people into boxes just when they are trying to come out of them.

The panel discussion was quite beautiful. It was about humanity, compassion, freedom, and a vision for our society in which all human beings can simply live their lives. It’s such a simple concept in some ways. Rabbi Micah summed it up like this:

So what are my core principles?

I think the first and foremost self determination and bodily autonomy. That every single person has the fundamental rights to determine their own identity, find the words for their own identity, and live their identity in community with anyone that they choose, that all of us has the right to fight live life in ways that are affirming and pleasurable and joyful, as long as they do not hurt harm or erase anyone else. And that every person has soul and complete autonomy in and over their own body. And that everybody is inherently worthy and deserving of celebration and deserving of pleasure. That's the core.

I find this text magnificent. It’s such a simple concept. That all people should be able to live with autonomy, freedom, and pleasure. That every human bein deserves to be celebrated in their own awesomeness. It’s beautiful. And seems so obvious.

And yet, it isn’t always. The thing that invariably gets in the way is gender. Our society is stuck on this insistence that people act according to the rules of their gender, instead of follow the rules of what gives them joy, pleasure, and fulfilment.

In cultures everywhere, people are still put into all kinds of boxes, especially gender boxes, full of expectations. And those boxes often hurt us. Especially those of use whose boxes expect us to be a little less of ourselves — to be less loud, to take up less space, to be less ambitious, to desire less, to want less, to have less power, to have less money, to have our needs served less, to be satisfied with less.

Those of us who were taught that we should be in that box of less — and be grateful for it, or enjoy it, or believe that it is somehow God’s will or the way of nature — may have suffered in those boxes.

And so Rabbi Micah’s text feels like a mission. To get people out of gender boxes and allow people to live freely as they are.