hankyoreh

Byun Hea-joung, Research Professor, Ewha Womans University’s Korean Women’s Institute

A lot of people want to be able to tell whether the people they meet are women or men. Fortunate for them, there are ways to do this, because between South Korea's national ID cards and public restrooms, there are a lot of ways to tell. A person's appearance, clothing, style of speech, and attitude also classify people by their gender. It is all so natural that you don't even think of sexual identity as being important in the course of your diverse range of relationships. But the world as it has been meticulously structured would certainly become a confused system if there were a lot of people who were undeterminable or who spoke of their sexual identity in different ways.

Recently I came upon some teenagers who were sitting next to someone that had a different appearance from the norm, and they were talking about the person's gender. Eventually, they concluded the person was "transgendered" and were whispering to each other as they debated whether the individual was originally a man or not. The person must have heard them, but got off at the next station without the slightest reaction. The teenagers giggled as they saw the person walk away. "He's got to have been a man!" one of them said loudly.

Why were they so interested in whether the person was a man or woman? What did the question have to do with them? Were they trying to be careful not to touch her improperly in the event she might be a woman? Granted, people get curious about a person's age, alma mater, home region, and lately also their race and nationality, and not just their sex. Some say you want to know those things because you care about a person. I think it is just unnecessary obtrusiveness.

Excessive interest in a person's gender is a way to make people fit neatly into societally sanctioned categories of 'female' or 'male' by reinstilling typified values and norms about societally orchestrated gender, rather than looking at someone's individual character and their capabilities in diverse domains.

This can be seen in the Supreme Court's recent special proposal about perceptions about transgenderism and gender change. The transgendered people that claim there are differences between what society dictates and individual identity as they've experienced it politically are talking about more than just the dichotomy of male/female. This society forces people to live as one or the other based on whichever they were "born" into, and so they suffer because of the simple fact that their emotional experience does not comply. Desire as they may to change their bodies through hormone treatment and even surgery, due to the society in which they live, that often does not end the pain they suffer.

The way our society finds itself able to recognize transgendered persons is by calling their often emotionally painful initial gender dysphoria a disease ("gender identity disorder"). This society tells them that - since they're "diseased" - they can have surgery and, in order to keep them from violating a sociocultural legal system that prohibits same-sex marriage, society says it is going to allow them to change sexes and have their legal identity (hojeok) changed as well - provided, of course, they are not already married and have no children. It is going to do all this while avoiding having to make any changes to the dichotomized gender parity and socio-institutional value judgments firmly in place in culture's symbolic order. All the while, this society that orders people to be either a man or a woman turns people who are not transgendered and are "just" men or women into people who are "diseased." Anyone that doesn't fit social rules, violates gender norms, or deviates from what is expected is always abnormal and "diseased."

The development of human rights that this society talks about every day is not about "allowing" those in the "margins" of society to be "accepted" into the sociocultural establishment. It is a matter of understanding their experience and changing that which we have taken for granted and which has therefore led to their pain. Why is it so hard to communicate so simple a truth?

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]