Miss Duck, Mr. Rabbit, and the Cat, II   By Melissa Tawn   What is gender bistability, anyway?

CASE FILE #2 (written by Catherine Gold, PhD, clinical psychologist): Gene came to see me for a second time two days later. This time, I sensed Gene and not Jean. He was wearing jeans, trainers, and a t-shirt and baseball cap with the university logo. On the other hand, he also sported bright pink lipstick and nail polish, and thus maintained the ambiguity which would allow people to react to him/her as they wished. Nonetheless, the overall sense was of Gene.

I asked him if he had resumed going to class, and he said that he didn’t feel he could yet. I asked him if he was afraid of running into Walter, and he nodded shyly. I asked him what he was afraid of, and he whispered “just afraid”. I asked him if he was afraid Walter would, all of a sudden, sense Gene and not Jean. He thought about it for a moment and shook his head. I asked him if he were more afraid that Walter would not sense Gene, thus using the (admittedly forced) analogy of Schroedinger’s cat, forcing him into being Jean permanently.

Jean disagreed (her body language changed subtly but noticeably at this point, as Jean came to the fore, taking over from Gene - or so it seemed to me) and, in fact, said that she disagreed with my whole analogy to Schroedinger’s cat.

“Life is not quantum physics,” she said. Let us look at a more humanistic discipline - say history.

What is the psychological identity of Napoleon? Every historian sees a different Napoleon. Was he the savior of France, a bloodthirsty tyrant, an egomaniac, a genius, a charlatan, a base opportunist? Each one of them writes a book or books thinking that he or she has opened the sealed box to reveal the “real” Bonaparte. But does that make all of the other perceptions go away? Does it make them less valid? And, of course, it is not just a matter of historians writing after Napoleon was safely dead. Every person who came in contact with Napoleon had his or her own version of what Bonaparte really was. But did that mean that the “real” Napoleon was determined by whether Josephine or Joseph managed to open some sort of quantum box and peek inside? Did Napoleon’s identity depend on what Sieyes or Talleyrand considered him to be? Nor can we ask what Napoleon considered himself to be. True, he was a very introspective person, who liked to analyze himself, but his analyses changed with his moods. Like most people, he probably knew himself less than others knew him, or at least thought they knew him.”

I replied that this was an interesting point, but - as I mentioned in our previous session - from a psychological point of view, we are talking about something much deeper. Gender identity is very basic. It is about whether you see yourself as a female or a male, not about what sort of a woman you are or what sort of a man you are. There are only two possibilities.

“I suppose that I could argue with you about whether there are only two possibilities: male or female,” Jean replied, “but I am willing to concede that point, at least for the moment. However, just as a two-element set has four subsets, we actually have four alternative gender identities: male, female, both, and neither. Obviously the vast majority of people opt for a gender identity which is clearly male or clearly female. That is the simplest thing to do. However, I am sure that in your professional experience you have also encountered, or at least have read about, people with no gender identity at all. So why is it so hard to accept the fourth alternative: that someone can be both male and female simultaneously?”

I admitted that there have been documented cases of individuals, who seemed to have no gender identity at all, but those were considered pathological and the individuals involved were invariably mentally disturbed on several levels. As for the fourth alternative - simultaneous male and female gender identities, there is no documented case as far as I recall. I told Jean that I found the argument unconvincing.

“Well,” said Gene, “let me try another mathematical argument. After our first session, I talked to my friend Marina over the phone, and she suggested an interesting mathematical model. Have you ever heard of George Banchoff?”

I admitted that I hadn’t.

“George Banchoff is a mathematician at Brown University, who was one of the pioneers of the use of computer animation to explain mathematical concepts. In the 1970’s, when computer animation was still relatively primitive, he wrote a computer program to illustrate the graph of the complex-valued function of a complex variable z --> exp(z). Now the complex numbers form a plane, which is two-dimensional over the real numbers, and so the graph of this function would be in a vector space of four real dimensions, which is obviously impossible to visualize directly. What Banchoff’s computer program did was to allow us to see any projection of this graph onto a three-dimensional hyperplane of this four-dimensional space, and move continuously from any one projection to any other.

The complex exponential function is very difficult to visualize. If we restrict our consideration to the X-axis (i.e. the real numbers) then the function r --> exp(r) is an unbounded rapidly-increasing function. On the other hand, if we restrict our consideration to the Y-axis (i.e. the purely imaginary numbers) then we know that exp(ai) = sin(a) + icos(a) for each imaginary number ai and so is both bounded and periodic. Banchoff’s animation allows us to see how a function can appear to be rapidly growing from one point of view and periodic from another. I am told that seeing it for the first time is an amazing experience.

Maybe this can help us understand bistability. The function has clearly only one “underlying identity”, namely as the exp function, but can be simultaneously seen as unbounded and rapidly-increasing or bounded and periodic, depending on how one looks at it. It is not like Schroedinger’s cat; people who look at it see different things, but they don’t force it to make a choice of what it has to be.”

We talked some more about this analogy, and then our time came to an end. We would continue in our next session. However, after Jean left, I admit that I was much disturbed by her comments. Perhaps I was wrong after all. I decided to consult with my boss Dr. Jayne Mautner and ask her if, in her long experience as a plastic surgeon specializing in gender problems, she had ever come across a phenomenon similar to Jean. After I explained the entire situation - and my problem in admitting the notion of a bistable gender identity - Dr. Mautner was quite unsympathetic. “You seem to have forgotten the tale of Ellen Caine.” she said. (AUTHOR’S NOTE: this case was discussed in detail in my story “The Doctor, II”.) “More importantly, you forgot the moral of the tale - we deal with individuals, not with scientific theories. If you come across a patient who does not fit your theory, concentrate on treating the person, not trying to squeeze him or her into the appropriate mold.

Gender identity, like legal identity, is something that most people want to be clear and unambiguous and so it seems to us that that is what must happen. But of course, there are a few people out there who choose to be ambiguous about their legal identity, simultaneously living two or three or more independent lives until they themselves are no longer sure who they really are. I am not surprised then there are those who choose to be ambiguous about their gender, even to themselves.

But that isn’t what you should be worried about. Jean has been severely depressed for the past two weeks. Concentrate on finding the root of that.”

Jayne was right, of course. The common failing of any scientist is to consider theory as a form of super-reality - a platonic ideal if your wish. Doctors have to look at individual cases, not at instances of theory.

At the onset of my next meeting with Jean (for it was clearly she who walked through the door, wearing sandals and a very short and sexy dress), I told her that she had obviously decided to forego her gender bistability for the meeting - one can hardly be ambiguous wearing such obviously feminine clothes. I was glad for that, I said, for I did not want to talk about theories of gender identity; I wanted to talk about Walter. “So do I,” said Jean, “which is the reason I dressed this way.”

I asked what had happened, and Jean said that they had met two days ago. “And …,” I said. “And,” he replied, “let us just say that Schrá¶dinger’s cat is out of the bag. He kissed me, and told me he loves me. I kissed him back. Then I told him everything.”

“Everything?”

“Yes, everything.”

“And what did he say?”

“He said he envied me. He is a biology student and so thinks in those terms - he called me an identity chameleon and said that he always envied chameleons for their ability to physically match their environment. He thinks that is a wonderful trait.”

“But whom does he love, Gene or Jean?”

“He said he wants and loves both, and hopes that he never has to make a choice between Gene and Jean.”

“Won’t that be confusing?”

“Well, he hopes I can teach him to become bistable too, but I frankly doubt that it is possible. I think that being bistable is something you are born with, or are blessed with. It is not something one can learn.”

“You may have a point there,” I replied. “I am sorry to say that my sabbatical ends tomorrow, so I won't be able to continue seeing you. I would appreciate it very much if you keep in touch with me and let me know how you are doing.”

Jean got up, came over to me, and air-kissed me. She then stepped back and gave me a very masculine handshake. With that, she/he turned and left the room.