Pandora's box - Thought Leader

Tick the appropriate box. White or black or other? Xhosa or Tswana or other? Jewish or Hindu or other? African, European or other? Male, Female or other? In Nepal they recently added a third box for you to tick in the area of gender on their voting registration forms and it’s time to start wondering why we haven’t done the same.

It’s important to consider what they’re really asking you when it comes to the male/female/other box and why they’re asking in the first place. Do they mean your biological sex? If so, where do they leave room for intersex people, or people in transition from one sex to another? Why does it matter? For employment equity? Or because I’m more likely to get cervical cancer than a man without a cervix? More importantly, why would this be relevant to a vote? Perhaps it’s for further research after the elections in order to better target an electorate. But a politician can’t hope to target a particular sex — s/he must want to target voters according to an understanding of their gender.

So if by male/female/other they mean your gender, surely there should be a box titled “a little bit of each”. Even trying to classify yourself according to gender leads you to speak as though there were objectively masculine and feminine ways of being. So if you say, “I’m a little bit masculine in this way” and “I’m a little bit feminine in that way” you are describing a world where masculinity and femininity appear ahistorical and objective. They are not.

For most of us our gender is not as simple as being 100% masculine or a 100% feminine or of fitting ourselves into one or the other box — we’re a conglomeration of layers and layers of socially sanctioned meanings, expectations and stereotypes mixed with a fair dose of our own negotiation. These things can hardly be fitted into a narrow box that you mark with a tick or a square. Perhaps a pie chart would be more appropriate.

The inclusion of a third box has opened Pandora’s box to illustrate that our understandings of gender as dichotomous are not really very useful at all. Where does that leave us? Are we to allow that some things are only seen as masculine or feminine because they’ve been that way historically? And if we do this and accept that there isn’t really a masculine or a feminine way of doing things, why do we even have the boxes at all?

It would be interesting to see whether people feel like South Africa is ready for a third box, or perhaps a fourth and a fifth. My feeling is that until we move beyond dichotomies Nepal is going to be leaps and bounds ahead of us in thinking outside of the box.