How Susan Stryker overturned my understanding of linguistic gender

MSc Gender, Policy and Inequalities student Wen Xiao explains how a talk by transgender scholar Susan Stryker made him reconsider the “naturalness” of gender in both English and Mandarin.

Like many students who come to LSE, I speak English as a second language. I grew up in China, where I learned “gender” through English, together with the familiar distinction that treats sex as biological and gender as social. Dictionaries and textbooks have made this distinction common sense, and I seldom stopped to ask where these categories, or the distinction between them, came from. Yet when I heard Susan Stryker talk at an LSE Gender event, the words I had taken for granted were overturned.

Professor Stryker, a historian and founding figure of transgender studies, challenged the familiar idea that gender is a purely modern concept. She explained that the word “gender” has a much longer history and was once primarily used to refer to relations between words, rather than people. This prompted us to think about the role linguistic practices play in creating and reinforcing categories. She also encouraged us to treat English as one language among many: its pronouns such as “she” and “he” make gender particularly visible and seemingly natural, yet not every language works this way. At LSE, where teaching mostly takes place in English, this is a profound reminder of how language shapes our understanding of gender, and how linguistic practices can create and reinforce categories.

This made me think of my mother tongue. In modern written Chinese, the character 她 (tā, “she”) was established during the New Culture Movement (1915–1923). Previously, the third-person pronoun 他 (tā) did not distinguish gender. To translate “she” in Western literature, modern intellectuals adopted 她 as its counterpart, and many feminists regarded this as progress. It was an active choice by Chinese scholars, yet also a way of reframing an ancient culture through English categories. “Gender” itself has a similar history in Chinese. 性别 (xìngbié) originally covered both sex and gender. To match the English binary, scholars created a new term in the 1990s: 社会性别 (shèhuì xìngbié), literally “social xìngbié”. Professor Stryker also noted that gender terminology spread globally in part through influence from international organizations. This rings true in China, where the term came into wide circulation following the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, convened by the United Nations. The Chinese “she” and “gender”, which I had taken as natural, even timeless, are both relatively recent.

Finally, Professor Stryker discussed the double meaning of the book’s title: gender is changing, and people are changing gender. Transness, she indicated, moves across not only the boundaries of the body but also the boundaries imposed by society. As a student who studies trans communities through fieldwork, I left the lecture deeply encouraged and hopeful. Words have histories, so their meanings are not fixed. We have the right to question them, and the right to rewrite them.

Wen Xiao

Gender Research Ambassador