Who Invented Gender? Amanda With ALOK  🔗 **Source:** [Who Invented Gender? Amanda With ALOK](https://share.snipd.com/episode/f848120b-685e-4212-827b-14fcef3514cf) ## Highlights - **How Pink And Blue Became Gendered Colors** - Color-coded gender norms are recent inventions, not timeless truths tied to biology. - Amanda Doyle traces pink-for-boys then pink-for-girls flips driven by elite fashion, media, and mass-manufacturing profit motives. Transcript: Amanda Doyle Walk into any baby store, you don't need a single sign. You already know which aisle is for whom. Pink for girls, blue for boys. It's natural, gravitational. Girls just naturally gravitate to pink, boys to blue. Why pick a fight or make an ugly stink over something so trivial? Let the kids like what they like. Just the way it is. Probably always has been. Except that's not the way it has always been. In fact, what used to be understood as natural and inevitable was the exact opposite. For hundreds of years prior to the 1800s, the pink-blue color signifiers were non-existent. Most infants, for most of all time, regardless of sex, were dressed exactly the same. All babies in simple white dresses. It was functional, practical. White was the easiest to bleach and wash and pass down to future children. Dresses had hems that could be let down as the child grew. Children, regardless of biology, wore these dresses until they were six or seven years old. And for those lucky duckies with enough wealth to dress their children in the frivolity of actual colors, guess what was the self-evident natural, just the way it is color rule? Pink was obviously for boys and blue was for girls. As a 1918 article from the Earnshaw's Infants Department explained, quote, the generally accepted rule is pink for boys and blue for girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl, end quote. There you have it. Pink, a version of red, was associated with strength, war, and therefore masculinity. Blue, which was linked to the Virgin Mary ascribing to her, for reasons that make steam rise from my raging head, the state of being delicate, therefore naturally blue for girls. And at the risk of subjecting you to color-blocked whiplash, rut row, several decades later, we have a new development. Thanks to the rise of mass-produced clothing and the irresistibility of profiting off of gender-specific fashion in the mid-19th century, clothing manufacturers and retailers Aim to double their profit by promulgating a new social standard, assigning strict colors to gender, thereby preventing parents from recycling gender-neutral clothes among siblings, Regardless of gender. And when mass-produced gender-specific clothing was introduced and enforced, uh-oh, we've switched again. Now we are 100% sure it is self-evident that blue belongs to boys and pink to girls. ([Time 0:02:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/66c37c9f-324d-409c-be66-92c4a422866c)) - **Rosie The Riveter Then The Pinkhousewife Reset** - World War II temporarily upended gender roles as millions of women entered heavy industry wearing denim blue. - Amanda Doyle explains the postwar push (GI Bill, Mamie Eisenhower, media) to re-domesticate middle-class white women and re-pink femininity. Transcript: Amanda Doyle It is, after all, the core of their very nature. We are now in World War II America. Here's the slightly awkward thing. After teaching women for many lifetimes that her natural God-ordained role was in the home and admonishing her that debasing herself to study or work outside the home would desecrate Her femininity and literally destroy her reproductive organs, oopsie-daisy, we have to call an audible. We are now engaged in a world war, which extremely inconveniently means the men need to go fight and therefore the women need to go to work to operate factories, make planes, keep the Towns and businesses running. And the women damn well did. More than six and a half million American women entered the workforce as new workers during World War II, including an unprecedented one in four married women. They worked heavy industry, factories, and manufactured weaponry with shockingly negligible reports of destroyed reproductive organs. The nation encouraged Rosie the Riveter to don her denim blue because it needed women's public labor for its own stability. For a few extraordinary years, the country watched women successfully perform jobs that human nature itself dictated them unsuited to perform. But yikes, now the men are back from war. They need their jobs back, their dinner on the table, their domestic peace, and definitely need their prior family power and financial dynamics restored. They also need to advance themselves financially and educationally on the GI Bill to attain levels never before available. So all the Rosies must revert to the level they previously occupied, taking off their blue button-ups and overalls and factory uniforms and military gear and go home. Encouraging middle-class white women, even married ones no less, out of the house to work had been a dangerous gamble because it ran afoul of hundreds of years of conditioning about Middle-class women's respectability and natural biology capacity and inevitable gender order. It was only allowed because the urgency of the war era for the nation's stability. Now it was equally urgent for the nation's return to a stable domestic order that women forget that weird aberration and revert to the previous agreement on their inevitable place. And let us be very clear that what we are talking about here is respectable middle-class white women femininity and nature. The absurdity being that it was only middle-class white women painted as too delicate for intellectual and physical labor, while poor women and women of color had been tolling in fields And later factories unceasingly for centuries. Post-World War II, this middle-class white femininity reboot was not just about the tranquility and order of the individual home. This gender role reset was a matter of tranquility and order of the home front. We are now in the depths of the Cold War. The primary strategy for national defense is literally domestic containment, and key to containing communism was containing the gender ideology that had inconveniently become Complicated by the World War II national security enlistment of Rosie. The family was a microcosm of the state, and with a post-war bestselling book declaring the working woman as hastening the end of civilization, sound familiar? Maintaining that gendered order a woman's civic duty. So it was that respectable white femininity needed an urgent and intense re-indoctrination. Just as national security activated Rosie, it now required a happy, contented, traditional, and apparently very pink housewife. Enter First Lady Mamie Eisenhower, wife of President Ike Eisenhower, who had been the mastermind of D-Day and the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force during World War II. Mamie was here to show us what love of country and femininity looked like now, and it looked unequivocally pink. Mamie remade the White House residence in pink, she wore pink, proselytized pink, quipping, quote, Ike runs the country, I turn the pork chops. She was known as the mother of pink and her signature color, Mamie Pink, or First Lady Pink, swept the nation. Hollywood produced films with anthems such as Think Pink, literally urging American women to banish blue and black and embrace pink, and with it, her natural blushing nature. ([Time 0:06:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/18deea85-742b-46ae-ba57-db0b9728a45c)) - **Gender Diversity Exists Across Ancient Cultures** - Gender diversity is ancient and global, not a modern invention or anomaly. - Amanda Doyle lists Sumerian Inanna, Roman priests, Buganese five genders, Hijras, mahu, Fa'afafine and others as historical examples. Transcript: Amanda Doyle One of the oldest civilizations we know, the Sumerians of ancient Mesopotamia, had their goddess Inanna, later known as Ishtar, who was associated not only with love and war, but also With transformation. Ancient hymns describe Inanna as someone who could, quote, turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man. Ancient texts describe members of Inanna's priesthood whose appearance, social roles, and gender expression did not fit ordinary expectations of men and women. This goddess and her priesthood and the texts surrounding them demonstrate that ancient societies knew the human experience was more complicated than two uniform boxes of man and Woman. In ancient Rome, the galley, priests of the goddess Sibylle wore typically feminine clothing, long hair, adopted feminine names, and many underwent ritual castration. The Buganese people of Indonesia recognize five genders and three sexes living harmoniously, including what we would today understand as trans men and trans women, as well as the Bisu, often spiritual leaders who, with our Western categorization, we would understand as intersex. Intersex is the term for the biological reality that between one and 2% of us across the globe, the same percentage as redheads, are born with sex chromosomes, hormones, and genitals For male and female bodies. An aside here to say that if any of us are within that one-ish percent of people born intersex, we likely have no idea. Intersex babies are generally subjected to irreversible surgeries on their internal sex organs or genitalia shortly after birth to force their bodies to conform to typical male Or female or quote, normal binary standards. The Bouganese people do not do this. They let natural biological reality do its thing. ([Time 0:14:39](https://share.snipd.com/snip/44395904-51b4-40a5-ab18-3682c59f78e7)) - **Property Made Gender A Political Category** - The agricultural revolution created property and inheritance questions that forced societies to codify gender. - Amanda Doyle cites Gerda Lerner: property and lineage made governments invest in neat gender categories for administration. Transcript: Amanda Doyle Humans stopped moving so much. We started farming, settling, building villages, domesticating animals, growing crops. And as a result of all of that, most importantly, we started accumulating things. Land, livestock, stored grains, wealth. For the first time, many people weren't simply surviving season to season. They were creating property. And once you have property, suddenly you have a new problem. Who gets it when you're gone? That question, who gets it when I'm gone, changed the world. Now, lineage matters. Marriage matters. Whose children are these matters. Society suddenly has a huge stake in our personal familial business. Genius historian Gerda Lerner found that this was one of the greatest turning points in the history of patriarchy. As wealth accumulated, societies increasingly regulated women's reproductive lives because inheritance depended on knowing whose children belong to whom. Agriculture, private property, and the rise of states fundamentally transformed gender relations because now the government is interested and the government needs categories. Categories make taxes easier, inheritance easier, marriage easier, military service easier. Neat boxes work well for the organization of nation states. Neat boxes do not work well for the reality of human beings. At first, these boxes aren't asking whether women are naturally nurturing or whether men are naturally ambitious. They're asking practical questions. Who owns property? Whose child counts as an heir? Who inherits when someone dies? Who controls a marriage? Gender is becoming something governments administer, not just families, states. ([Time 0:18:49](https://share.snipd.com/snip/058b8d4d-8c81-4a25-90e6-b9f2b3b6fea7)) - **Medieval Law Wrestled With Intersex Realities** - Medieval Islamic jurists wrote extensive laws to handle people whose bodies didn't fit binary categories. - Amanda Doyle emphasizes governments adapted legal codes to reality rather than erasing those people. Transcript: Amanda Doyle Why? Because reality keeps refusing to cooperate. For example, medieval Islamic jurists wrote pages and pages of laws to determine how the legal system of the day applied to a recognized group of people who were born with bodies that Didn't fit neatly into male or female categories, what today we would generally describe as intersex people. They wrestled mightily with how inheritance law, marriage law, and religious obligations should apply to these people. The medieval jurists were not pretending these people didn't exist or arguing that they should not exist. They were adapting their legal codes in light of the natural reality of their existence. ([Time 0:21:02](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e59522d3-34f7-47f1-adc7-b2cf45c100c0)) - **Aristotle Turned Custom Into Natural Law** - Aristotle transformed social customs into perceived natural law, fixing hierarchy as 'natural.' - Amanda Doyle shows how philosophers and later Victorian science biologized cultural roles to justify male authority. Transcript: Amanda Doyle Around the 4th century BC, along comes a philosopher whose influence on Western thought is almost impossible to overstate, Aristotle. Aristotle wasn't simply describing the world around him. He was trying to explain why the world worked the way it did. He looked at the deeply hierarchical society he lived in and concluded that hierarchy itself was part of nature. He observed that some people were naturally suited to rule, others naturally suited to be ruled. Men were naturally more rational and active. Women were more emotional and passive. He concluded and taught in his biological writings that women were in fact incomplete and defective versions of men. His authority reigned for nearly 2,000 years. The reason Aristotle matters so much is that he did that ultimate cultural trickery loop. He took what was in fact cultural custom and transformed it into nature. That move from social practice to natural law is one of the oldest, most powerful moves in history. Because once something is declared natural, questioning it no longer feels like questioning society. It feels like questioning reality itself. And after Aristotle, the new religion of science was there to carry the torch and perpetuate the loop. This was in fact not science, but the transformation of customs into biological destiny, with each new so-called scientific discovery reinforcing the same preordained socially Constructed conclusion. ([Time 0:26:47](https://share.snipd.com/snip/38d4a4a4-7ffd-4f23-9eaa-4a65f940dca6)) - **Nazi Book Burnings Destroyed Early Gender Research** - Scientific and archival efforts that documented gender and sexual diversity were violently erased by fascists. - Amanda Doyle recounts Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science and the 1933 Nazi book burnings that destroyed decades of research. Transcript: Amanda Doyle One of the founders of modern sexology was a German physician named Mangus Hirschfeld. Hirschfeld was doing something very different from many of his contemporaries. Instead of insisting, contrary to reality, that everyone fit neatly into two categories, he spent decades documenting the astonishing diversity of human experience. He described what he called, quote, sexual intermediaries, people whose lives didn't fit the rigid categories Victorian society had inherited. Today, that umbrella would include people we might understand as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and many others. Hirschfeld wasn't using today's language. Those words didn't exist yet. But his cultural insight was remarkably modern and remarkably ancient. That human, sexual, and gender diversity is far more complicated than our artificial categories. In 1919, he founded the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. It became one of the first places in the world where people could study sexuality and gender scientifically without assuming difference was pathological. Researchers gathered case histories, medical records, photographs, personal testimonies to understand human diversity. But this knowledge, this documented reality of the human experience was dangerous to those who wished to deny it and who wanted to build a world based on the fiction of an ideal superior Model. In 1933, the Nazis destroyed the Institute for Sexual Science. Students and stormtroopers looted the Institute. They burned the archives in the streets. Many of the most famous images we have of Nazi book are in fact photographs of Hirschfeld's life's work, the record of queer, trans, and gender diverse reality going up in flames. ([Time 0:30:49](https://share.snipd.com/snip/53b2a7c5-7b83-4a47-9735-826271f8be0a)) - **Colonialism Standardized The Gender Binary** - Colonial powers actively erased and criminalized indigenous gender systems to impose a binary patriarchal order. - Amanda Doyle cites the British Criminal Tribes Act targeting Hijras and how colonial courts redefined property and family law worldwide. Transcript: Amanda Doyle When the British colonized India and discovered the Hidra, the third sex long understood, accepted, and revered in South Asia, they couldn't allow that reality to stand. In 1871, the British enacted the Criminal Tribes Act, specifically targeting Hidras, placing them under government surveillance and effectively criminalizing them. Think about what that means. A community that had existed for centuries didn't suddenly disappear. The law simply decided it didn't and shouldn't exist. And colonialism wasn't only changing gender. It was changing families. Remember how societies got interested in gender when property and therefore inheritance became a thing? For most of us, we understand that, regrettably, it has just always been that property passed from father to son, impoverishing daughters intergenerationally. It's unfair, but just the way it was, naturally. But that wasn't universal. Among the Iroquois Confederacy, and clan membership traditionally passed through the mother's line. Women selected and could remove male chiefs. Land use was deeply connected to matrilineal clans. Than his own son. Among the Nairs of Kerala, India, instead of inheritance passing from father to son, it passed from mother to daughter or maternal uncle to his sister's children. Likewise, the Minangkabao of Indonesia passed ancestral land from mothers to daughters. These were sophisticated systems of governance, inheritance, and family organization that had existed for centuries. And every time European colonizers encountered these systems, they sought to destroy and replace them with a legal system built around the patriarchal model in their own image. Colonial courts recognized male household heads as the legal owners of property, even where women had traditionally held authority over land or lineage. In many parts of the world, women didn't lose power because their own society suddenly changed their minds. They lost power because colonial governments stopped recognizing the systems had given women authority in the first place. Hundreds of conceptions of family became one model. Enormous human diversity was tortured into two tiny categories. Colonizers didn't just conquer land. They defied reality to standardize humanity. And like the Nazis burning the Institute in Berlin, sought to make historical reality disappear. ([Time 0:34:05](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b19a026a-6d23-4c7e-9b15-6790b945a28b)) - **Transness As Creative Self Invention** - Transness can be an act of creative self-invention that reclaims agency and pleasure. - Alok Vade Menon describes giving birth to themself: wearing what feels beautiful and reclaiming means of pleasure from projections. Transcript: Alok Vade Menon What a beautiful way to put it. You're right. I think that there's this narrative structure that there's a relentless crusade against trans and non-binary rights. I want us to edit that. Yes, and. It's a relentless crusade against creative self-expression, against wonder. It's a war against whimsy, for sure. And that casts a shadow on all of us, because it's a theft of imagination. The idea is that there are pre-formatted Bridgerton era rules and restrictions that you have to comply with. Not that a life is your creative act. Not that living is your ministry. Not that every day can be sculpted with the same quiet intensity as a painter. And what my transness has afforded me is the ability to give birth to myself, to fashion a life where I wear what makes me feel beautiful, me, not other people, where I love who I love unabashedly, Where I have reclaimed the means of my own pleasure from other people's projections. ([Time 0:39:43](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ec34a6e8-486d-41ca-b057-145f3eec29b9)) - **Choose Love Speech Over Pure Deconstruction** - Reframe leadership and culture around love and care rather than only intellect and deconstruction. - Alok Vade Menon argues we need 'great lovers' as leaders and to develop a vocabulary and practice of love speech. Transcript: Alok Vade Menon And I think we need a collective reckoning with how we've defined intelligence as a brain thing and not a heart thing. I'm bored by people saying, where's the next generation of great thinkers? Great thinkers got us in this mess. I want great lovers. Where's the next generation of the biggest hearts in America? And I want that to be our leadership. I think leadership is not like your ability to give a hot take, like deconstruct. Like a lot of people can do that. Leadership is the ability to like sew the world back. I've been thinking a lot about what I'm calling love speech. Why is there a framework for hate speech in our culture, but not for love speech? Huh? So we know bad words, but we don't know good words. And what love speech for me is like, it's about sewing back the world together. It's about saying the way that we resist polarization is not by rebranding polarization, but actually rebuilding us a common ground. ([Time 1:21:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/13eb0755-368e-4692-812e-b32727068f45))