Trump Perpetuates and Rigidly Enforces the Gender Status Quo That We Must Obliterate

Though it seems routine by now, each time I hear President Donald Trump verbally and viciously attack journalists, particularly women of color, who are doing their job by asking him hard questions, I feel as though he has punched me in the gut, making me almost want to scream out against this monster bully-in-chief.

The President of the United State, the most powerful position in the United States and possibly in the entire world, sends a strong message in his verbal assaults that women are unworthy to hold the esteemed post of career journalist, and that they are not even deserving of the courtesy of respect, which is due to every human being.

Recently, the President called one female journalist “dumb” while accusing another of being “a stupid person,” one after the other in a matter of mere seconds, as they questioned him about the inflation of petroleum products brought on by his war on Iran, and whether public taxes would be used in the construction of his ballroom.

In retrospect, as I have been thinking about these exchanges, in my mind’s eye I was transported back to a beautiful town in southeastern Poland on a very warm summer day during one of my frequent trips to that country where I conduct genealogy and Holocaust research.

My good female Polish friend and I were walking along one of the streets, which connected to a small grassy field. On the other side of the field was a building site in which two young shirtless men whom I considered to be very attractive were laboring in the hot sun.

As my friend and I were walking, I kept my glance on the men. After a very brief time, they noticed me, and as they did, I saw their fists clench and their faces tighten to a mad scowl. They then tossed their tools to the ground as they began to step forward in our direction.

I have seen this same body language on men in my own country of the United States. It comes as a reaction from a privilege, or more accurately, a right that males are granted after their first breath of life when the doctor announces, “it’s a boy.”

This right, which is unearned and the exclusive domain of those assigned male at birth, goes by the label of the “outward male gaze”: that powerful stare males are promised in their objectification of girls and women.

Any other male who objectifies them, on the other hand, violates the rules they have so completely internalized. Any other male who objectifies them does so at their own risk of ridicule, ostracization, and violence.

Some men allow women to objectify them when it may feed their vanity as long as they maintain ultimate control over the gaze.

And there is a strong connection between how President Donald Trump viciously berates primarily female reporters and the rageful reaction directed toward me from the young men in Poland.

That connection is the privilege males are accorded in a patriarchal system established within a power hierarchy with males on the very top layers subdivided between “Alphas” on the summit and “Betas” somewhat lower. Females are placed down to the bottom depending on their age and physical appearance.

Gender roles (sometimes called sex roles) include the set of socially defined roles and behaviors connected to the sex we are assigned at birth.

This can and does vary from culture to culture. Our society recognizes basically two distinct gender roles. One is the “masculine,” having the qualities and characteristics attributed to males. The other is the “feminine,” having the qualities and characteristics attributed to females. A third gender role, rarely condoned in our society, at least for those assigned “male” at birth, is “androgyny” combining assumed male (andro) and female (gyne) qualities.

“Gender” is constructed as a verb (a repeated action). According to social theorist Judith Butler in her book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity:

“The act that one does, the act that one performs, is, in a sense, an act that has been going on before one arrived on the scene. Hence, gender is an act, which has been rehearsed, much as a script survives the particular actors who make use of it, but which requires individual actors in order to be actualized and reproduced as reality once again.”

Gender roles maintain the sexist structures of society, and heterosexism reinforces those roles, for example, by casting such epithets as “faggot,” “dyke,” “homo,” at anyone who steps outside their designated gender roles regardless of their actual sexual identities.

Society flings these symbolic spears at the heart of anyone who violates established (socially constructed) norms of behavior, those which society often considers traitors to their sex.

All people in our society, no matter our assigned sex designation, are saddled with the heavy burden — yes, burden — on the “masculine / feminine” binary. Concepts of masculinity and femininity promote the domination of males over females and reinforce the identification of maleness with power.

Assigned males are encouraged to be independent, competitive, goal oriented, and unemotional, to value physical and mental courage and toughness. Assigned females, on the other hand, are taught to be nurturing, emotional, sensitive, and expressive, to be caretakers of others while disregarding their own needs.

Society mandates that males must be “in control.” They cannot get too close to their feelings, and if they do, they certainly cannot allow them to show. They must “keep it all together” and to “suck it up.” They cannot show vulnerability, awkwardness, or doubts. They must be “on top,” in bed and out.

Within the Male/Masculine conflation, society maintains a rigidly controlled hierarchy: On top is found the so-called “Alpha Male,” characterized as the leader(s) with inflated confidence, mental and physical toughness, they are highly competitive with the goal of winning as more important than what is contested.

They see these as weaknesses: intellectualism, empathy, showing strong emotions except anger and rage. They have a presence (take up the space they inhabit; being seen as physically dominant, virile). Signs of tenderness or vulnerability are only allowed for other teammates in the arena of gladiators, when inebriated, and during the heat of sex.

The Beta Male, on the other hand, are seen by the Alphas as the followers, unremarkable, who lack confidence, avoid risks and confrontations, lack physical presence and charisma, and are emotional.

Though ultimately unattainable for all males, the deceptive rabbit of masculinity circulates around their track of life on patriarchal wires that project the alluringly tasty rewards of control, security, and independence, but only if they perpetually compete in the race by sprinting after that elusive rabbit.

Some boys and men internalize this socially mandated illusion of masculinity to the extreme, to a self-destructive and toxic hyper-masculinity. As they run and run and run around the course, they invariably stumble, hurting themselves and others along the way.

They build and accumulate frustration turning to resentment and then to anger and often rage because they can never truly reach, grasp, and consume the promised patriarchal bait.

For those men and boys who survive, the societal masters dispose of them as dog trainers dispose of the overworked greyhounds. They are stalked, controlled, used, wasted, and ultimately slaughtered.

Girls and women, who also grow up in a patriarchal system of domination, are certainly not immune from internalizing these messages and thereby, they may even collude in pressuring males to join and remain in the race.

Compulsory masculinity, when it reaches the level of toxic hyper-masculinity and even beforehand, demands of all boys and men their surrendering of their critical reasoning by never challenging the system, along with losing their individuality, their moral and ethical compasses, their emotions, and their very integrity and humanity for some promise of security, support, and sense of camaraderie and the privileges that automatically accrue to followers of the patriarchal system of domination and control.

Taken to extremes, this often results in violence. On the international scale, it results in wars.

According to the social rules, however, gay and bisexual males can never ascend to the top ranks unless they achieve the pinnacle of social status through occupation and wealth. Transgender males can be accorded a certain degree of male privilege if an essential condition is met that other people outside of their friendship spheres perceive them not as transgender but, rather, as males assigned at birth.

Transgender females within this patriarchal pyramid, however, are seen as gender traitors, who, therefore, must forever relinquish their former standing on the gender order.

This hierarchy of gender, just like the hierarchy of race, is a fiction, a myth. It is made up. It is socially constructed or produced to grant power and dominance to some (males) while delegating others (females) to the ranks of the powerless and marginalized.

The outcomes often result in violence against women, gay and bisexual men, and trans people.

Within the United States, violence against women, primarily intimate partner violence, including sexual violence, is currently a major public health problem. The World Health Organization estimates that 1 out of 3 (30+%) women worldwide have been the target of either physical and/or sexual intimate partner or non-partner violence in their lifetime. WHO found that the trauma women experience has lifetime effects on their physical, mental, sexual, and reproductive health.

Violence against women and girls, like most social problems, is not inevitable, and it has solutions such as massive educational efforts, establishment of more support systems, codification of mandated institutional and governmental policies, men and boys acting as positive role models, and each of us calling out those who violate the physical and emotional spaces of women and girls and all others who are targeted on the lower rungs of the social ladders of privilege and power.

Fortunately, a new generation of assigned males, assigned females, assigned intersex people, and also trans people is challenging the system by revolutionizing the former conceptualization of gender identity and expression. They are shaking up traditionally dichotomous binary notions of male/female, masculine/feminine, and gay/straight.

They are courageously calling into question this social myth of gender normativity and heteronationalism, the boxes society places us as it imposes upon us all our gender scripts. They have opened the boxes for all of us to ultimately obliterate the gender status quo of binary oppositions within a hierarchical system by demonstrating the visible ways, the options upon an enormous gender continuum, one that does not depend upon a sex assigned to us, an assignment that is imposed and forced upon us by society.

Their stories and experiences have great potential to bring us into a future — a future in which anyone and everyone on the gender spectrum everywhere will live freely, unencumbered by social taboos and cultural norms of gender. It is a future in which our unrestrained expressions can live and prosper in us all.

This new future will come faster when we as a society collectively stop lifting or electing leaders who manifestly enforce and advance this gender status quo.