Of Course Haircuts Have Genders

A t the barber recently, I noticed a little rainbow-colored sign bearing the slogan: “Haircuts have no gender.” Mine does, unless we are no longer allowed to call it “male-pattern baldness,” and I missed that memo.

Could be — I miss a lot of those memos, thank goodness.

Of course haircuts have genders. Everybody knows this even if our current moment of mass sexual psychosis obliges some people to pretend not to know it. There isn’t any law that says a retro-minded man can’t rock “the Rachel” or (speaking of Rachels) Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes can’t have the same haircut, but that sort of thing stands out because haircuts have genders. Same with Harry Styles and those dresses and pearls. The whole gender-subverting thing can work out really well, especially if you happen to be traffic-stoppingly good-looking to begin with: Sinead O’Connor looked great with that buzzcut in 1989. I imagine that there were a fair number of women and a statistically non-negligible number of men who liked seeing Brad Pitt dressed up like Jan Brady in Troy.

De gustibus and all that.

Gender is, of course, a grammatical term, a way of classifying nouns in some languages. The idea that there are more than two genders is very old news — about 2,700 years old — to students of Latin. The intellectual history here is convoluted and almost unbelievable, but the idea of gender as a superseding replacement for sex made its way out of grammar and into the current pop ideology mostly via literary theory. Ideas matter — in the long run, they matter more than anything else in community life.

In one of the great little ironies of linguistic history, the word gender got wrecked because we first wrecked the word sex, which until the day before yesterday meant what people and government forms generally mean by gender today. Sex stopped meaning what it had meant before because we didn’t have a word everybody felt comfortable with for what we use sex to mean today: Coitus, borrowed from Latin, was simultaneously clinical and comical, while sexual congress put together two words that nobody wants to think of at the same time.

Before there was gender, there were sex roles, which is how we described the social expectations associated with one’s sex. The elevation of gender above sex was, of course, programmatic and intentional, a kind of lexical battering ram for the feminist project of denying that there was any biological basis for the different and distinct social expectations of men and women. In this, gender is a little like sexual orientation: Before there was sexual orientation, there was behavior and there was inclination — preference, proclivity, taste, etc. Homosexual described a class of acts rather than a class of people — though gay-rights activists sometimes point to the indulgent attitude toward homosexual relations in the ancient world as an example to be followed, the Romans would have been flabbergasted and horrified by the very, very recent innovation that we call “being gay.” But the gay-rights movement wanted to pattern its crusade on the civil-rights movement, and so it became very invested in the idea that homosexuality is analogous to race, because if it is, then having a negative feeling about homosexuality is like having a negative feeling about African Americans or short people or people with brown eyes — mindless bigotry. Of course, some attitudes toward homosexuality are mindless bigotry, and some are not — ironically, we modern people have a hard time thinking about these questions in non-binary terms, as though “pro-gay” and “anti-gay” were the only meaningful categories relevant to the issue.

Of course, that line of thinking is pretextual, a post hoc justification for the conclusion that already has been reached. Nobody really believes a word of it, of course. There is pretty good reason to believe that pedophilia has a biological basis and that it may even be in some part hereditary, but nobody thinks that this really tells us anything about whether pedophilia is something that should be tolerated. “How dare you!” will come the content-free rejoinder. Of course homosexuality is not directly comparable to pedophilia — it also isn’t directly comparable to being black. Comparisons assume that things that may be similar in some aspects are different in other aspects — that is how comparisons work.

I suspect — and hope — that a century from now, we will look back on this moment as one of breathtaking stupidity and intellectual crudity. There is a lot more to human sexual behavior and the social expression of sexual sensibilities than is accounted for in the three or four folders in which we expect to file everything.

But there are some things that do not have to be complicated. We have never segregated sports by gender — we have historically segregated sports by sex. The history of women’s sports is full of gender-non-conforming women, and there has never been any real feeling that they should be made to participate in men’s sports, instead. We can take a humane and kind attitude toward people who wish to present themselves socially in some way that is at odds with traditional expectations of their sex without becoming delusional or fanatical. And while our current gender madness is very much à la mode, there are a few genuinely desperately unhappy people who find themselves radically alienated from their sex, and they deserve both our sympathy and the best care that can be given them. None of this obliges us to pretend that sex isn’t a real thing or that people are not the sex they are, nor does it oblige us to behave as though elective genital amputation and other forms of ritual mutilation were self-evidently legitimate as a therapeutic strategy. Still less does any of this oblige us to accept the surgical or chemical mutilation of children as medically or parentally ethical.

Because we aren’t just talking about haircuts here.