Gender Outlaw

Gender outlaw refers to an individual who does not conform to society's expectations for their biological sex. In Western societies, sex is often conflated with gender, meaning that women are expected to abide by certain “rules” of femininity, and men must follow particular “rules” of masculinity. Not following these rules may result in material consequences such as discrimination, societal marginalization, and physical violence.

Western society has constructed sex, gender, and sexuality along the lines of a binary. Therefore, one is supposed to be either male or female, masculine or feminine, heterosexual or homosexual. A gender outlaw violates one or more of these binaries in some way. For example, not all babies are born with “intelligible” genitalia. Rather than accepting variation, society labels such people as “abnormal.” Therefore, the parents are likely to approve sex-reassignment surgery. The baby's genitalia are then surgically shaped into either a penis or a vagina. Besides “ambiguous” genitalia, gender outlaws may not identify as their biological sex; for example, a male identifying as a woman. Also, a gender outlaw may be a person who “does” or “performs” gender in a way that does not reinforce the gender binary.

Kate Bornstein is perhaps the most well-known contemporary gender outlaw within gender studies. In her book, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us, it is “the rest of us” with whom she is concerned. In this work, she discusses her coming of age, highlighting how gendered and sexualized norms worked for and, more commonly, against her. She challenges cultural customs, beliefs, and institutions that are readily attached to the categories male and female by drawing on her own experiences of sex-reassignment surgery and identifying as a lesbian, transgendered woman.

Gender defender is the term Bornstein uses to describe scholars, activists, and the like, who insist on using, defending, and understanding gender as naturally linked to one's assigned sex. Gender outlaws, on the other hand, challenge gendered and sexualized binaries through writing, performance art, photography, poetry, and activism, in addition to many overlapping mediums. Some gender outlaws such as Brandon Teena, though not politically active, experienced embodied gender oppression through his everyday experiences.

Gender outlaws are also found in various geographical regions throughout the world. These regions necessarily make a direct link from binary sex categories to binary gender identities problematic. For example, as anthropologists and activists have shown in Thailand, automatically linking female and male to feminine and masculine and heterosexuality and homosexuality is highly problematic. A common cultural term, pheet, synthesizes sex category and gender identity and allows the reading of multiple genders and sexualities, thus complicating assumed binaries. This example is only one of many that challenge Western gender binaries. Gender outlaws, therefore, may be constructed as “abnormal” in certain cultural contexts but considered “normal” and sometimes spiritual in other cultural contexts.