Descartes famously separated body and mind. While our bodies clearly have a gender, some argue that our minds do not. Consciousness is not physical; can the immaterial awareness that makes up the core of our identities, have a gender? writes Olivia Fane.
Here’s a question I’ve been pitting to friends and family this last month: if tomorrow you woke up without a body, would you be able to guess what gender you are?
I’ve been asking it since I listened to a radio program on Radio 4 recently on gender and artists. Female artists earn ten percent of what male artists do, but when potential buyers of a painting were asked to guess the gender of the artist, they confessed they hadn’t a clue. Obviously, some mega injustice is going on here, but also something far more interesting: when we don’t know a person’s gender, it’s well nigh impossible to guess it by the work they do. We can’t tell the gender of a musician, or a composer. Examiners can’t tell the gender of those who submit exam papers, whether in English, science or maths. Would we be able to say of Thatcher, May or now Truss, that it was obvious they had ‘female’ values and went about doing their politics in ‘female’ way? I don’t think we could. So, what makes us think we would guess our own gender? And if we have a stab at it, would we be being sexist?
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