Here's a concept that I have been excitedly ranting to friends about for the past month or so. I recently read Dr. Jane Ward’s 2010 essay “Gender Labor: Transmen, Femmes, and the Collective Work of Transgression.” While the essay is very 2010 in its terminology and depictions of gender, it posits an interesting framing of the collective work necessary for the perpetuation of gender. Ward draws on interviews, documentaries, and representations in media of relationships between transmascs and their femme partners in order to locate commonalities in gender role dynamics. She investigates how these femmes “validate and celebrate their partners’ masculinity and[…] suppress the complexity of their own gender and sexual subjectivity in the service of this goal.“ Ward writes about the importance of external feminine validation to the subject transmascs in order to maintain their masculinity, how their partners build them up and support them through their specifically gendered words and actions. Ward calls this practice “gender labor,” and says that it is a collective effort shared by everyone, but that there are power imbalances at play like any other form of labor:
“As I will demonstrate, all genders demand work, and therefore all people both give and require gender labor. However, some genders, principally those that are masculine and especially those that intersect with other forms of power (such as wealth and whiteness), make their demands less visible and more legitimate, or deliver them with more coercive force.”
Also:
“To the extent that gender is always a shortcoming or never-achieved ideal, I want to suggest that gender is always already bound up with the search for people and things that will offer relief, compensate for failure, enhance dignity, and create moments of realness. In this sense, gender labor is the act of giving gender to others in an attempt to fulfill these needs.“
Ward is especially interested in the intimate labor provided by those with feminine genders, and the burden therein in the context of misogynistic culture. This is absolutely a worthwhile investigation and I would encourage you to read the rest of her essay, but I want to take a different tack with the concept of gender labor, and instead look at the possibility of gender labor automation.
Workforce automation has been a hot topic for years, as improvements in computing and increased centralization of capital have led to businesses to look for ways to shed their employees. Most people think of fancy machine learning taking on these roles, but in my own experience workforce automation had looked more like building a website to replace a mailed form, and then suddenly 30 people in Tennessee who had been turning forms into database entries by hand end up in the unemployment line. But automation can be used for positive purposes as well. A small company can provide services to millions of people with merely some servers in the cloud and a skeleton crew of employees.
In a transphobic society, you could say that transgender people experience a shortage of gender, while cisgender people seem to have a surplus. Transphobic behavior such as deliberate misgendering when viewed through the lens of gender labor can be interpreted as a form of Luddism, as it is not merely a willful refusal but is instead actual sabotage of the performance of gender labor. In struggling for societal acceptance we fight for our “gender labor rights,” and that shift of the balance of power demands that privileged individuals perform their fair share of labor. As we continue the work of broader trans acceptance, I believe that there are ways for us to harness automation to both shift the balance of labor and also produce gender for trans consumption.
I’m personally less interested in the question of shifting the balance of labor, as answers seem pretty straightforward to me: increased community for transgender people, better communication for coordination of solidarity, efforts around visibility to sway cis perceptions. I try to do some of this work myself by using social media to nurture local trans spaces and coordinate events. As a friend reminded me recently, “building trans community is praxis.” But for the purpose of this blog entry, I’m more interested in the fun stuff. How would you go about automating production of gender to help address the gender shortage trans people experience?
One of the first examples that came to mind when I started pondering this question was an amazing website I discovered during my gender questioning phase, Turn Me Into a Girl!. Turn Me Into A Girl! has one premise: clicking a button on the website will definitively turn you into a girl. If a visitor clicks a button at the top of the site, they are asked to confirm their choice. After confirmation, a loading screen appears for a few seconds with a small cancel link below, and then the visitor is taken to a landing page that says: congratulations, you are now a girl! Cue confetti animations. It seems silly, but there’s some interesting psychology at play here. The website is testing the visitor’s implicit preferences, how comfortable they feel with becoming a girl, by providing a frictionless path to that self-concept. There are routes to bail out of the visitor feels wrong or uncomfortable during the “loading” phase, allowing for some internal questioning of the feelings that come up. And finally on the landing screen, the visitor’s gender is validated and celebrated in a nurturing way. This is gender labor coming from an automated source!
Another set of apps that I might call a form of gender labor automation are face generation and editing apps like FaceApp and Snapchat filters. By providing contexts in which users can envision themselves as particular genders, the apps perform a kind of validation and “moments of realness,” in Ward’s words. But this “gender technology” can come from unintentional sources, too - look at Picrew, or character creation screens in videogames. How many trans people have written about their early gender exploration starting in places like these? I know I have. Playgrounds for self-concept are sources of gender validation, and as forms of technology can reach other people at scale.
I want to challenge creative coders and artists who read this to experiment with what other forms of gender labor automation could look like. I think that with intentionality around the idea of performing gender labor, some really interesting hardware and software could be created. If this writing helps inspire work on this front, I would love to hear about it!