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Using C Code and DNA to Understand the Technology of Transfolk

Suppose you are with me where I so often was last semester, in the Computer Graphics lab in Park at 2 am in the morning. There is a wide table in the center of the room on which students can spread out their papers or commune to discuss a program or their lives. One long connected desk borders the room and on which computers are spaced out more or less evenly. There’s a big window out which I could see tree branches and through which could tumble in a little air, if it were daytime and if the windows were slightly open. But it is dark outside and the windows are closed. My eyelids feel the pressure of twelve hours of being awake pulling them down, my mouth like rubber and squashed downwards in thought, in the disregard my mind is paying it. But my hands are still typing, so I suppose that means my brain is intact.

My hands are typing up triangles and circles that can swivel and move on the screen in front of me. They are writing in the programming language C, a language far more structured and logical than our own – far less ambiguous than English or Spanish (the only two human languages I know), far less open to interpretation or context. When you “say” something in C, it has a single meaning. This closure allows you, a human, to communicate with the computer, a machine, which can’t really do the multiple-interpretation thing. Ok so I’m a woman and I’m typing on a computer: there’s gender and technology for you. Yet the purpose here is to provide insight into the gendering of people, and specifically of transfolk, by means of an analogy to what I do in the Computer Graphics lab – ie computer programming, or “coding”, as well as to the DNA that codes for my biological self. The point is that gender is a type of technology, a code, that humans can alter and rewrite, but which is currently programmed in a way that tends to produce binary output (male/female), yet which occasionally challenges this assumption. Further our society is part of a process whereby gender technology inscribes itself onto people and people inscribe it onto themselves (and onto technology).

I will discuss three aspects of computer programming as they relate to the “genderization” of a person: how a program (gender) system works at a basic level; how we write a program and how gender is inscribed on a person; and how the system can do something unintended, how people can change their gender category, and how people within the system can create a new system for thinking about gender. Musings from the study of DNA will inform and add elaboration to this paper as well.

How a program (gender) system works at a basic level

The computer sitting in front of me at this late hour is, at its most basic level, a very intricate physical circuit system, ie a group of interconnecting wires that have a lot of on-off switches (kind of like the on-off switches for DNA code which can be carried out or ignored). The point of it is to give input to the system, in the form of some on-off switches, in order to produce output, in the form of some other, resulting on-off switches. This physical basis of computers reflects the point of computer programs, which are in essence input/output systems. This is shown more pictorally in Figure 1.

Now the point of social gender systems is not necessarily to give input and produce output, but we can think of it in that way. We put a person into a social gender system (they are input into the system) which has (at least) two results: 1)a social classification of that person’s gender and 2) a self identification of the person’s own gender (see Figure 2).

Biological sex can be seen as a program, or technology, as well, taking DNA, hormones, and other factors as input, using proteins and the hormones to “run the code” and resulting in typically male , female, or alternative endocrine systems and genitalia. Now that I’ve discussed how the gender system works in terms of programming, I turn to how I write the technology of gender in the first place.

How we write a program and how gender is inscribed on a person

In computer science, we always start with a problem. Let’s say the problem is to swirl triangles on a screen. In biological terminology, the problem would be how to give traits to a person, how to establish their phenotype. In society, I can ask what gender a transgender person is seen as or self-identifies as.

After establishing a problem, I design an algorithm – or recipe, or method, if you will – of how to solve the problem, and then I write this into a code. In biology, one part of code is the genome and the DNA, which creates sex chromosomes and leads to brain development, hence taking part in the process of transcribing a human being with gender and sex. The social code or technology of gender can be interpreted in how people self-present. People judge the gender of someone based on an accumulation of certain rules in a gender code – such as men have beards, women wear skirts, etc. – rather than a single criterion. Ultimately, though, the Western gender code has an ultimate rule of placing a person in either a “man” box or a “woman” box. On the My Right Self website, Val says that patterns are inscribed onto the body, patterns from social forces to dress a certain way for instance, and patterns from “natural” processes like our DNA.  So along with gender codes and technologies that people perform, we can add DNA as a “technology” (after all, DNA is human-made) that inscribes itself onto us.

What is a trans person in computer programming language? So we have a system, a social system, that tries to classify people according to a binary categorization: male or female, or shall I say 0 or 1[2]. In terms of biological sex, this duality, or system of bits, could be modelled by the sex chromosomes X and Y to make either XX or XY. Now this biological classification is not perfectly accurate, because someone might have an X and Y chromosome and be biologically female due to, for instance, hormones, or they might not have an XX or XY genotype – their genes could be XXX, or XXY, for example. The gender that society assigns to someone is problematized by transgendered individuals, since the assigned gender is different than the self-identified gender. The self-identified gender, for some people, does not fit into the binary system – or as Ryan put it “gender is fluid”. The binary analogy to computer science breaks down, so I choose a different computer science analogy for gender: the long computer program.

How people within the system can create a new system for thinking about gender

This past summer I worked at ITA Software Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One of the smaller assignments I had was to edit a tiny piece of a program of many thousands of lines spread across five or ten separate documents. Programs are organized into functions, which each have a small individual task to do which helps with the overall goal of the program. Imagine a person’s gender is a thousand line program like the one I edited this summer. Say the program is called WhatsYourGender.c. It has functions like getSexChromosomes(), getHormones(), getSocietalConstructions(), and getSelfDefinition(). The program must combine all these little functions to return the two outputs I discussed above – social categorization of a person’s gender and their own identity.

In Patricia Gagne, Richard Tewksbury, and Deanna McGaughey’s “Coming Out and Crossing Over: Identity Formation and Proclamation in a Transgender Community” the authors say that most of the transgendered people they studied transitioned completely to the polar opposite gender from their own which they then enacted. The transgendered people who did not do this, “tended to exist among individuals who… in the process of trying to understand who they were, began to question the legitimacy of gender as a defining characteristic of self”[3]. While most people accept the duality of the current gender system without questioning it, a group of people is challenging this system. The analogy is a code that is generally expected to output a binary or boolean response – 0 or 1, male or female. As Sandy Stone discusses in “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto”, some people challenge the system in a way that brings them to the opposite of expected output, a female instead of a male or vice versa – which she says in some ways reinforces the system and allows society to continue inscribing its binary system upon people. Yet some people, she points out (in similarity to Gagne, Tewksbury, and McGaughey’s point), instead of reversing the output that the gender code assigns them, are challenging the systems output type[4]. They are saying “let’s allow this system to output infinitely many possible floats (ie floating point numbers, real numbers, or numbers with digits in them as opposed to integers) instead of just two integers” – in other words, instead of 0 or 1, male or female, let’s allow 0, 0.2, 0.97539, 52 – male, female, somewhere in between, and something completely different.

In response to Ruth’s original question, yes, gender is a technology or code, but it is currently and continually evolving and being rewritten. The social gender code(or WhatsMyGender.c) is very large and a huge number of people (in fact all of society) are taking part in writing this code or this gender technology. A huge number of people (all of society) is also being written upon, or inscribed with, this very code, and even writing and performing themselves into this code – by the clothes they wear and how they act. Transgendered people are no exception, though they are evolving the code in a new way. The piece of code written by the transgendered person typing down the hall is for some reason allowing for variation, diversity, and difference from the original version 1.0 binary gender program – and I’d call this a feature, not a bug. 🙂