Revolution in Gender Fluidity Linked to Rise of Trump, Author Argues
By Amanda Holpuch
To understand Donald Trump’s rise, it is worth considering the emergence of female masturbation courses in China, according to author Frank Browning, whose latest book, The Fate of Gender, was released in the US on Tuesday. The book, which only gives a brief nod to the presumptive Republican nominee, explores the science behind one of the most prominent movements of our time – the democratization of gender – and the reaction from those in traditional positions of power: men. “There is a resentment that transfuses western society having to do with this change of a role of authority and power, and Donald Trump responds to that,” Browning told the Guardian in a phone call from his home in France. Browning used his experience as a former NPR science correspondent to explore this topic under a close lens: from meeting with Shanghai’s “sexy sociologist”, Yuxin Pei, as she spreads the good word of female masturbation to talking with Norwegian preschool teachers about their classroom gender experiments, Browning provides scientific substance to discussions about how people shift from traditional definitions of gender, or are gender fluid, today. “The fluidity of gender is universal,” Browning said. “Human beings don’t like straitjackets unless they are French bureaucrats or North Korean apparatchiks. They move in and out of these roles as cultural hegemony permits them”. A key theme of the book is how the increased acceptance of gender fluidity and industrialization – which brought men out of the fields and into offices, where they have no inherent strengths compared to women – has destabilized traditional power structures. Browning said the gender revolution can help explain the resurgence of rightwing extremism in Europe and why it is possible for a former reality television show host to become the presumptive Republican nominee for US president – even though he has made racist, sexist and xenophobic comments. “We’re going to see in a decade what we’ve seen in the last five years, a movement for which Trump happened to be the dandy on hand,” Browning said. “And gender is a big piece of that”. Browning said that today, men hold fewer positions of power and are being demoted in society. Simultaneously, people are exploring gender more openly and have easier access to online forums through which to explore differing types of gender and sexual expression. As Browning writes in the introduction to his books, apart from fundamentalist extremism, he says “nothing seems to stimulate or threaten conventional stability so deeply as the shifting terrain of gender – and indeed it may well be that the steady erosion of gender roles motivates fundamentalist rage even more than the historic abuses of race, poverty and imperial presumption”. There is no question that men still dominate positions of power, but Browning’s book gives scientific substance to discussions happening all over the world about how much longer they will have that power and what it means once they don’t. But Browning devotes relatively little time to the most talked about aspects of gender fluidity – like the battle for trans rights in the US – in favor of providing a global perspective on the ongoing transformations in perceptions of gender. “The whole big issue about trans at the moment is not at all about ‘trans’, it’s about class and it’s about gender instability and the realization that women are just as good at those jobs as men are,” he said. The trans issue, which he carefully explored with children and adults who have transitioned, and their families, is given as much space as the history of religion and gender. Catholicism, in particular, gets significant attention for its institutionalized repression of women and sexual minorities by – among other things – opposing birth control, abortion and same-sex marriage. In discussing violence against those repressed groups in predominantly Catholic countries, Browning writes: “The Vatican, of course, regularly denounces any form of domestic violence, but human rights workers argue that it is the underlying teaching of the church in the light of the gender equality movement that continues to fuel what can only be seen as an intensifying gender war.” The church is also mentioned as a marker for how quickly things have changed – Browning writes that while same-sex couples openly parenting a child 50 years ago could have been imprisoned for child abuse, a priest is more likely to be imprisoned on such charges today, as the clergy sex abuse scandal has shown. Browning, who has authored seven other books exploring sex, America and faith, said the research process started with his childhood on an apple orchard in Kentucky, where people who strayed from the heterosexual lifestyle were accepted, as long as they kept to themselves. As a child, he asked his mother why one of these people, a young woman from a “proper southern family”, went to a men’s haircutter. His mother said: “Because that’s what Miss Bess does and Miss Bess is very nice.” Browning said: “My Mother was saying oh shut up and accept it – accept that the world is more complicated than you think.”
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