Currently, the 1970s-era Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI)  is about as useful as a Buzzfeed gender quiz in that it can only offer the slightest peek at one’s gendered experience with culturally sexed roles. For instance, I wonder how my result would have changed had it asked me if I ride a Harley, if I like to debate, or if I’ve shot a gun. While these things might mark one as more masculine, such metrics break down when its applied to a native Texan who grew up in non-urban areas where motorcycle culture was prominent. The cadence at which I speak, being willing to argue the weather, and having worked a farm say things about a particular kind of culture that I, along with all the cisgender people who grew up in the area I did, might very well share when compared to someone who grew up in San Francisco. I’m sure the Texan women I ride my Harley with would argue the idea that riding a Harley is essentially masculine. In this way, my critiques are not very different from other objectification tests such as IQ tests. Such tests offer ways of objectifying self in relation to standards that may or may not be biased.

Having said that, for what it is, I think the BSRI is brilliant in that it helped break through the power-knowledge that gender non-conformity was itself a sign of mental illness. Several 1970s-era doctors staunchly believed that gender role conformity was akin to a bedrock of sanity and that those who were gender non-conforming revealed a deficiency in their mental health rather than revealing a deficiency in a society. I’ve interviewed numerous individuals who were put through various “treatments” and even involuntary confinement because they didn’t conform to gender roles. Tests like the BSRI helped expose a crack in a prevailing gender gestalt that materially hurt a lot of people, many of whom were children. Bem said:

This sex-role dichotomy has served to obscure two very plausible hypotheses: first, that many individuals might be “androgynous”; that is, they might be both masculine and feminine, both assertive and yielding, both instrumental and expressive—depending on the situational appropriateness of these various behaviors; and conversely, that strongly sex-typed individuals might be seriously limited in the range of behaviors available to them as they move from situation to situation. According to both Kagan (1964) and Kohlberg (1966), the highly sex-typed individual is motivated to keep his behavior consistent with an internalized sex-role standard, a goal that he presumably accomplishes by suppressing any behavior that might be considered undesirable or inappropriate for his sex. (Bem, 1974)

This insight felt like an echo of early Western feminist philosophers like Ruth Herschberger and Simone de Beauvoir who critiqued the notion of a sexed body binary in the way Bem critiqued the gendered role binary. For instance, in 1948 Herschberger quipped:

As important as the differences in sex organs—the books imply—is that the mature male should possess broad squared shoulders, heavy brows, straight arms, narrow hips, cylindrical thighs, blunt toes and bulging calves. The mature female is chartered by soft sloping shoulders, a short neck, bent arms, wide hips, conical thighs. Small feet and knock-knees. To insure understanding, illustrations are provided, the man looking as though he had been plagiarized out of a Bernard McFadden testimonial and the woman out of the Rubens Gallery at Sarasota.

This, then, is the True Male and the True Female, the average, the typical, and to judge by a look around us, possibly extinct.

For these representatives of the basic differences between the sexes appear to have been put together by calipers and glue rather than by the shakier hands of Mother Nature. While statistical facts helped evolve these sexual stereotypes, the Facts were crossbred with selected Ideals, probably for the noblest of eugenic purposes. What we find sketched therefore is not so much the average man and woman as an ideal man and an ideal woman. (Herschberger, 1948)

Here, depending on how one chooses to perceive these early feminist critiques, early Western/Materialist/Radical feminist critiques the notion that the biology of a body binary is rooted more in culture than nature. Herschberger, like Bem considers how those who are perceived to not attenuate themselves near the stereotyped polarity of male and female are constructed as being deviant, wrong, and problematic. Herschberger’s answer, like Bem’s, is to shatter the illusion of the average and clearly state that most of us do not sit at either edge of a continuum and that we, in fact, exist along something closer to a bell curve.

All of this reminded me of a challenge someone critical of what they termed “transgender ideology” (something I’ve yet to see defined) posted to an article I’d written. Their point was that trans women’s bodies couldn’t be considered “real” female bodies since trans women constructed their bodies. They wrote, “What do you classify as a ‘feminized’ body? Do you include artificially feminized bodies that are the result of synthetic hormone consumption and plastic surgery?” I replied:

Are you really going to assert the ad naturam fallacy to distinguish between “real/authentic/good” and “fake/inauthentic/bad” feminized bodies? Tell me, how many billions do non-trans women spend on “synthetic hormone consumption”? How many billions do non-trans women spend on “plastic surgery”? How much money do you spend on sexed diets, exercise, scents, hairstyles, etc? In light of this, are you really going to attempt to construct an ad naturam argument for body shapes?

The basic critique I made in this new media format was, at its heart, not so different from the point Herschberger and Bem urged people to observe: the binaries we tend to see are, in fact, cultural constructions. This self-reinforcing “logic” about binaries and their place in the world goes something like: there are people objectified as man and not-man (which we call woman) and because not-man’s form naturalizes her as woman, her function naturally follows her form. All sorts of logical fallacies are precipitated by various iterations of the “logic” expressed in the previous sentence:

• For a cis/trans/intersex woman to be a woman, she needs to approximate that form naturally.
• For a cis/trans/intersex woman to be a woman, she needs to approximate that function naturally.

The problem is, as both Herschberger and Bem point out, these forms and functions are rarely “natural” even as they are seen as being key to what is essentially woman. The trap in this thinking is that we personally get anything like a real say in the way culture perceives us. There’s a reason women tend to care about “natural” rejuvenations, creams, and foods, oftentimes explicitly gendered in such a way as to quietly reinforce a women’s gendered status. Monique Wittig commented on that reason when she noted that to be “woman” is a status that does not go without question, “since to be one, one has to be a ‘real’ one.” (Wittig, 1992).

All women, be they cis, trans, or intersex, understand that their status is something they must participate in or face the consequences. These consequences are the precise reason gender conformity is not consensual. The reality is that we do not get a say in this system; no person, be they cis, trans, or intersex, gets to choose the gendered binary culture places us into in that, no person gets the freedom to not pay the price for gender non-conformity. The radical feminist Anne Koedt wrote that, “the threat of being called lesbian touched real fears; to the extent that a woman involved with a man, she feared being considered Unfeminine and Unwomanly, and thus being rejected.” She went on to remark on how woman is culturally enforced:

There was also the larger threat: the fear of male rejection in general since it is through husbands that women gain economic and social security, through male employers that they earn a living, and in general through male power that they survive. To incur the wrath of men is no small matter. Women knew this long before they put it in feminist terms… Being called unfeminine is a comparatively gentle threat informing you that you are beginning to waver, whereas being called lesbian is the danger signal—the final warning that you are about to leave the Territory of Womanhood altogether. (Koedt, 1973)

Should culture choose to exile someone from the class we term woman, that person has little to no say in the material reality they will exist within. During this era, women deemed lesbian were banned from women’s spaces like national feminist conferences and was problematized as sexually dangerous by culture. Hence, it became necessary to create a “Woman-Identified Woman” culture (Radicalesbians, 1970) wherein a person deemed Lesbian—whether or not she was sexually attracted to other women—could exist without having her identity defined by (male) culture. From this new culture sprang new and powerful ways of being for women that collectively moved the dominant culture’s Overton window to a place where women could experience a measure of equality even as other feminist thinkers like Monique Wittig worked to destroy the very metric culture utilizes to construct binaries.

Bem seemed to know two paradoxical things that needed to be exposed: 1.) even the most stereotypical man and woman were performing gendered acts not out of a free form of self-expression, but rather as an act to protect themselves from the cultural consequences of gender non-conformity; and 2.) most people are, in fact, gender non-conforming. I think that Bem understood that pretending that material reality wasn’t reality was probably problematic and the source of a lot of suffering. In this way, her test was designed to pry some eyes open and I think we’re all the better for it. My hope is that we can see further than Bem’s work helped us see so that we come to understand the constructed nature of not only function, but form as well.

If I were to reimagine Bem’s gender test for modernity, I would situate it around one’s subjective gendered experience of both behavior and body attributes in order to get a sense for each subject’s own experience of gender. With a large enough sample, I think we’d find that even though culture still penalizes gender non-conformity, most people subjectively experience their behavior and their embodied self along a sexed continuum instead of anything like a strict binary.

Bem, S. (1974). The measurement of psychological androgyny. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 155-162.

Herschberger, R. (1948). How to tell a woman from a man. In R. Herschberger, Adam’s Rib (pp. 3-4). New York: Pellegrini & Cudahy.

Koedt, A. (1973). Radical Feminism. New York: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, Ltd.

Radicalesbians. (1970). The Woman-Identified Woman. Retrieved from Duke University Digital Collections: https://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/wlmpc_wlmms01011/

Wittig, M. (1992). The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Boston: Beacon Press.