Gender identity and Subconscious Sex
I have never been able to connect with the term ‘gender identity’ very well. Intellectually I know what it means of course, but each time I, or a client uses it, I find myself having to search my mind to remember exactly what it refers to. The wording of the phrase doesn’t conjure up any instant recognition for me. As the psychologist, that doesn’t matter, as long as the phrase makes sense to my clients. But I find that, even with my clients, it often gets mixed up and confused with other gender terms, like gender expression and other understandings, like the social construction of gender. I recently read ‘Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity’ (a truly excellent read), written by Julia Serano. She offered an alternative to gender identity, which made a lot of sense to me, and as I’ve found since, has made a lot of sense to many of my clients.
Julia Serano coined the term ‘subconscious sex’ to stand in place of gender identity. When I came across the label, I had an instant ‘aha’ moment.
Subconscious sex…it instantly seems to cut away all other concerns that confuse and plague my clients (concerns that equally need to be worked through and processed in their own time), and seems to go right to the heart of the matter. It allows my clients to quiet the ‘noise’ from external influences, like their gender expression, cultural ideas of femininity and masculinity, their childhood history, other people’s opinions of them. It helps them turn the volume down on all of ‘that’, to get very quiet, to bring their attention inside, to listen to what they know to be true about their sex internally. What is their subconscious sex? What is their internal sense of maleness or femaleness or neither? What do they already know about themselves?
Most clients come knowing their true sex, or lack of, already, but all those other influences can dilute the validity of that knowingness and have them questioning the validity of what they know to be true. Starting from this foundation, sitting in this place of deep knowingness, having this knowingness strongly validated as truth, as fact, can be very healing and soothing, and creates a strong foundation for the rest of our work together.
In the words of Julia Serano, the best way she has found to descibe her subconscious sex, is that on some level, her brain expects her body to be female.
In some cases, therapy starts with helping clients accept what their brain expects their body’s sex to be. In other cases, clients have accepted this, but the part of them that knows they are a different sex to their body needs to be validating and given a voice. In other cases, this knowingness has been covered up with layers of confusion from the world we live in and we need to gently see if we can uncover the knowingness so it can sit clear and unobstructed. Of course there are a grat many other presentations, but these are some of the more common ones I’ve noticed. What I have found, is that by starting with an exploration of subconscious sex, it can provide a very clarifying and firm foundation for future therapy.