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Changes reshaping our relationship to gender are some of today’s most fascinating. They also represent some of the cultural concerns that are pertinent to mental health. They suggest new options that for many people are key to well-being and also contribute to confusion that can lead to anxiety and overwhelm.
Creative Systems Theory (CST), the body of work that underlies my work, points toward two kinds of changes that are key to today’s evolving gender realities. Each involves the “bridging” of a key kind of polarity, the ability to think systemically about a juxtaposition that at least in modern times we have assumed to be a given. I explore both kinds of change in depth in my book On the Evolution of Intimacy.
The first kind of change is most readily grasped, although it requires a concept that people may sense but not consider consciously. Psychology describes how some psychological qualities can be thought of as more archetypally masculine, others more archetypally feminine—we experience some as harder or softer, more expressive or more receptive. CST proposes that historically we have never understood gender for just what it is. Rather, when we have looked at someone of the “opposite sex,” what we have seen is projected gender archetypes. It is this that has given us the traditional picture with two wholly distinct gender categories. The theory delineates how the differing ways gender differences have been perceived at different periods in culture reflect how the relationship between archetypally masculine and archetypally feminine qualities has manifested at particular historical times and places.
The first kind of change is a product of beginning to appreciate how everyone manifests both more archetypally masculine and more archetypally feminine qualities. We see such change reflected in postmodern views that make us increasingly open to non-binary definitions of gender. The CST concept of Cultural Maturity highlights the mechanism of such change. The concept describes how it is becoming newly possible in our times to step back and consciously engage the whole of ourselves—the whole of our human complexity. Archetypally masculine and archetypally feminine reflect two key aspects of that complexity. With Cultural Maturity’s changes we are better able to “bridge” the masculine and feminine in ourselves and in a similar way to understand others with a newly systemic kind of completeness.
This first kind of change is profound, but it can only represent a start. It takes us beyond the historical rigidity of gender roles and gender-specific notions of identity. But ultimately more is needed. The postmodern view easily has us confused better holding the whole of our complexity with gender being anything we might choose. We end up in a unisex world, or alternatively a world with an infinity of options, none more appropriate than another. Today we reside in an in-between time with gender-related changes.
The second kind of change takes us the rest of the way. Its recognition is almost wholly missing in today’s gender conversation. Cultural Maturity’s changes not only “bridge” archetypally masculine and archetypally feminine, they do the same thing with the polarity of mind and body. This further kind of change has essential implications for the gender conversation in that it helps us more deeply engage ourselves as gendered beings. In a culturally mature reality, while it is true that psychologically everyone is non-binary, we also come to live more deeply and more fully in our bodies—including our sexuality, however it might manifest.
When we combine these two kinds of change we get a picture that takes the gender conversation forward in ways that have consequences both for people who identify as cis-gender and for those where gender-related questions may be more complex. For the first group, the result is at once freeing and grounding. It encourages a more fluid and complex relationship to gender and gender roles, one with many more options. And at the same time, it invites a person to celebrate being a man or woman, whatever the particular balance of qualities that comes with that person’s temperament and whatever that person’s sexual orientation. Where gender-related concerns are more complex, implications with regard to the role of medical interventions with transgender identity come immediately to mind for me as a physician. The first kind of change helps us appreciate why we might be more open to such conversation. It also makes it more understandable why a growing number of people today describe themselves as questioning their basic gender identity. And it supports people who are transgender in the sense of literally feeling that they are inhabiting the wrong kind of body in being open to this depth of questioning. While these are all good things, we also need the second kind of recognition for the current transgender conversation not to be simplistic and lead to choices that may be ultimately unhelpful. When people engage their body experience over time, often they find that things are not as simple as just misplaced identification. There are a multitude of ways to live in a male or female body, and how we experience it can change over time. This kind of recognition helps us approach choices that might involve permanent changes with greater humility. It is essential that gender confirmation surgery and the like today are options—for certain people they are a godsend. But we also need to be careful that current transitional realities, and social-political advocacies that can accompany them, don’t have individuals reach premature and ultimately limiting conclusions.
Changes of a gender-related sort are some of today’s most consequential when it comes to questions of identity, and with this, our sense of mental well-being. If we are to address them effectively, we need to step back and do our best to understand all that may be involved.
