Dr. Catherine Anderson has been a professor at McMaster for 20 years. She is currently serving a six-month term as Acting Vice-Provost Teaching and Learning. Otherwise, she is the Director of the Gender and Social Justice Program and a professor in the Linguistics and Languages Department.
Interview Transcript:
Riley Wilson: Okay, so we’ll just start, I’ll have you introduce yourself and just talk a little bit about your work at Mac and your career.
Catherine Anderson: Yeah, so my name is Catherine Anderson. I’ve been a prof at MAC for 20 years.
Right now I’m in the role of acting vice provost teaching and learning, that’s just a six-month term. When I’m not doing that, I’m director of the gender and social justice program and also a prof in the linguistics and languages department. So I teach at a lot of levels, undergrad through grad.
Riley Wilson: Amazing, and so I kind of wanted to talk to you today because of that dual focus on gender and social justice and women and also linguistics because we’re talking about language and how this argument around gender essentialism, women’s embodiment and transphobia is being framed by like right-wing talking heads online and we’re seeing kind of a rise in that. So we’ll just start by talking a little bit about examples that I’ve seen online where you know these talking heads will kind of try to trap usually younger college students in this kind of rhetoric where they’ll be like okay well you’re a feminist, you should be able to define what a woman is, like what is a woman? Or there will be conversations about how women’s worth comes from bearing children or giving birth and then that has implications as to what a woman’s role is in other areas of social life. So how do you think about this cultural shift that’s kind of happening right now and yeah?
Catherine Anderson: Oh okay, so
Riley Wilson: big big question.
Catherine Anderson: Yeah, how do I think about the cultural shift? I think that the category of humans who have traditionally had the power and privilege, largely the straight white men, have not lost any power or privilege but they have observed that occasionally some people who aren’t straight white men also achieve some measure of status and power and that makes them afraid.
Riley Wilson: Yeah.
Catherine Anderson: I mean I can go into the whole like merit and competence thing.
Okay, so that makes them afraid because a lot of them are not very skilled, not very good at their jobs, not very smart, but they’ve been able to maintain power and privilege because of being straight white guys. Yeah.
And when other people can achieve status or power by being competent and smart and skilled, then someone who hasn’t got competence might feel threatened.
Riley Wilson: And so yeah, that’s kind of what’s happening like what we’re observing right now.
Catherine Anderson: Yeah.
Riley Wilson: And so it’s kind of manifesting in this language around or like fear-mongering around, you know, lots of things, women’s sports, bathrooms, all kinds of stuff. And so when we come up against that rhetoric, what do you think is the right way to go about kind of trying to respond to it? And that might change in person versus online and we can kind of get into those distinctions. But yeah, just what are your thoughts?
Catherine Anderson: Yeah, and it depends a lot on who you’re talking to and what the context is and what the nature of the argument is.
So the first thing to keep in mind is that these are not good faith arguments, right? These are arguments that are designed to try to keep us in our place in what they think is our place.
Riley Wilson: Yeah.
Catherine Anderson: Right.
So engaging in good faith is a waste of your energy. That’s the first thing I want to say. There may be some cases where engaging at all is not worth your energy.
Riley Wilson: Yeah.
Catherine Anderson: So I was once stuck on a very long plane trip with someone who, I don’t remember how we got on this, how we got on the topic, but it was something about, oh, I know what it was. Okay.
I was once on a long plane trip and I was, the person sitting next to me, once the meals came around, we took off our headphones, we started chatting. It came up that I was a professor in Canada. And he asked what I thought of Jordan Peterson.
Riley Wilson: Classic.
Catherine Anderson: So I shared some of my thoughts. And right away, the seatmate of mine launched into the, but what about women’s sports issues?
Well, it’s not fair. My sisters are athletes. It’s not fair if trans women can compete against them because why? I don’t know. It’s not fair. It was his assertion. And I started engaging in good faith. I started saying, oh, you should read the work of Julia Serrano. You should read the work of Caitlin Burns. A trans woman who’s been on estrogen for a long term has no competitive advantage. I started that and he was arguing, arguing, arguing. And then I just said, you know what? I think I’m done. There was another eight hours left in this flight. I just put my headphones back on because he just wanted to argue. He didn’t want to learn anything.
So that was a case where it wasn’t worth my time. Then he hogged the armrests the whole way.
So sometimes you don’t want to. Sometimes you encounter people who haven’t quite figured it out and maybe they just haven’t encountered an actual trans human. And they’ve heard something from somewhere on TV or online and they think, oh, well, yeah, what about women’s sports or what about bathrooms? Oh, men shouldn’t be allowed in the bathroom.
And those are the cases where you might be able to make a bit of headway with those people, with an actual human that you have some kind of relationship with. Those are the times where it’s probably worth engaging because they might be willing to learn from you if they know you. And so that’s where you can say, well, actually, so on the bathroom question, what does it matter what the parts of the person in the stall next to you look like? How does that affect you at all? How are you ever going to know what the anatomy is of the person next to you? They might just think, oh, I haven’t thought that through.
And even if you both come out of the stall at the same time and the person in the stall next to you is tall and has a deep voice, maybe you feel a little uncomfortable. Oh, well, it’s not a crisis. They probably also feel uncomfortable if you’re eyeing them funny. And both of you could just wash your hands and carry on and nobody is harmed by that. And so sometimes people have that first reaction of, oh, of course, they shouldn’t be in the bathroom. But then once they actually think through the steps,
Riley Wilson: it’s not as scary
Catherine Anderson: they can realize it’s fine.
Riley Wilson: Yeah.
Catherine Anderson: Yeah. So those are kind of the two big ones, the sports and the bathrooms. What were the other ones that you wanted? Is that enough on that question?
Riley Wilson: Yeah, that’s perfect for that question. Yeah. Because I think that the good faith versus bad faith and also the, is it worth engaging? Because I think that.
Catherine Anderson: On the airplane?
Riley Wilson: Yeah, on the airplane, no. Clearly. And I think it does change, you know, we kind of got into this a little bit beforehand, but it changes when you’re engaging in person versus if you’re seeing a video online. Because often, like when you’re in person with someone, kind of, I did a little bit of reading about, you know, responding to either. And when they utter something into a conversation, it’s kind of entered into the ground of the conversation.
Yeah. And if it’s not taken up, sometimes it can be viewed as legitimate.
Catherine Anderson: Yes.
Yeah. So you don’t want to cede the starting assumptions.
Riley Wilson: Yeah.
Catherine Anderson: Right. But. Yeah.
And so sometimes the middle ground between not engaging and having a good faith conversation is, “oh, well, that’s ridiculous. Yeah. Oh, you don’t believe that.”
You don’t, you know, just to like to be dismissive and then not engage. So sometimes that’s the effective technique.
Riley Wilson: Yeah.
Catherine Anderson: Oh, don’t be silly. Someone tries to say, oh, well, you know, I got the measles vaccine and then it gave me measles. You say, oh, that’s ridiculous.
Riley Wilson: Yeah.
Catherine Anderson: Yeah. You kind of, s you’re not seeding. Yeah. But then you’re moving on.
Riley Wilson: Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, versus replying online is like sometimes people can just shout into the void online.
Yeah. And if you engage with that and reply to that, you can kind of be taking part in.
Catherine Anderson: Well, and remember on social media, the whole point of the algorithm is to maintain your attention, to keep people looking and clicking.
So by engaging with the argument, all you’re doing is keeping more eyes on that content and making more money for the owners.
Riley Wilson: Which I think is part of the reason why we see so much of this content now is because people are angry about it on both sides of the issue. So, yeah.
So you kind of have to think about that there. So that was great.
Kind of on the bathroom, like, and that kind of gets into transphobia. And then I think that there’s, and you kind of touched on this, is that I think that one of the reasons why this issue is a bit confusing for people, and we talked about this briefly before, but we’ll talk about it here again, is that in our culture, gender is viewed as something that’s very central to how you view yourself or it’s encouraged to sometimes be that way. And so people can get protective about this idea of womanhood or girlhood that only certain people can engage in. And so just kind of decentering that or.
Catherine Anderson: Yeah. So our society is organized around these two binary categories. And second wave and third wave feminism did this job of helping us all recognize that one of those categories is privileged over the other, and so this category needs to be protected.
Riley Wilson: Yeah.
Catherine Anderson: And so needs to be protected from the injustice of not having access to the same opportunities that men do as a category, yeah, that’s a laudable goal.
But then once you’ve got those binary categories and you’ve framed one of them as needing protection, then it’s really easy to turn that into, well, this group needs protection because they’re weak, because they’re vulnerable, because they’re special. And you tell that group it’s because you’re so special.
Riley Wilson: Yeah.
Catherine Anderson: But that specialness is a way of, again, keeping them in their box, keeping us in our boxes.
What did I want to say about the binaries?
So another one of the consequences of the kind of feminism that says girls can do anything, girl power, that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Like that allowed us to be proud of being girls and women. That’s great. Yeah.
So I’m a Gen Xer. I was a kid in the 70s. And I grew up on free to be you and me. Like, isn’t it great? Girls can do all the stuff that boys can do. Yeah. And so there was still encoded in that a bit of, well, the stuff that boys do is more valuable. But you can do that too, even though you’re a girl. You can,yeah, get up there. But that’s the valuable stuff.
You could be a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer, even though you’re a girl. So that’s what I grew up on.
Riley Wilson: Yeah.
Catherine Anderson: And so it took me a while to unlearn that pattern of, oh, the really desirable roles in society are the roles that have traditionally been men’s roles. And so the kind of feminism that embraces femininity and says women’s work is valuable and liking to pay attention to fashion and makeup is not inherently less valuable just because women do it.
I’m in favor of those kinds of arguments too, especially where it means we can value care work, where we can value roles like nurses and teachers and early childhood educators that traditionally have not been valued because they’re women’s roles.
So I’m really in favor of that kind of movement.
Riley Wilson: Yeah.
Catherine Anderson: But then the sort of nasty other side of that is, well, fashion and makeup and childcare are valuable, so you should be content with fashion and makeup and childcare.
I’m not so cool with that.
Riley Wilson: Yeah. It’s a tough balance to strike.
Catherine Anderson: Yeah. So I don’t know if I have advice on countering that, and I forget what your original question was. Anyway, that’s my thinking on those categories.
We were on the binary categories, right?
Riley Wilson: Yeah.
Catherine Anderson: Okay. So the other thing I want to say is that we’ve constructed our society on these kind of binary categories, which is an artificial structure.
The binary gender is a bimodal distribution, but it’s not a categorical distribution. There’s not a bright line where all men do X and all women do Y. That’s absurd in terms of interests and strengths and abilities and everything, but also in terms of what people’s bodies look like.
Riley Wilson: Exactly.
Catherine Anderson: There is a lot of variability between cis men in the cis men box, and there’s a lot of variability between cis women in the cis men box, and there’s a whole lot of variable in between that we mostly don’t see because we’re used to perceiving the world in categories.
Riley Wilson: Yeah.
Catherine Anderson: So my sister’s two kids are a boy and a girl, and they both have long blonde hair, and when a sitter comes over, the sitter always says, oh, I’ll take care of the girls.
Riley Wilson: Yeah.
Catherine Anderson: Just because this one kid they’ve never met before has long hair, and that’s enough for them to slot them into the category of girl.
Riley Wilson: Yeah.
Catherine Anderson: I have two boys. When they were little, we were out playing in the driveway, and I had done my nails, and I did the boys’ nails because it’s fun to have color on your nails.
Riley Wilson: Yeah, it is. Yeah.
Catherine Anderson: And our next door neighbor was like, you can’t put nail polish on them. And I said, why not? Well, they’re boys.
Riley Wilson: About what? They have nails.
Catherine Anderson: And yes, they have fingernails. They like colors.
There doesn’t have to be anything gender. It’s really arbitrary that we’ve decided that colored nails are for women, and naked nails are for men, and facial hair is for men, and naked faces are for women, and generally fewer women have facial hair, but there are women who have facial hair who spend a lot of time trying to remove it because we’ve decided that they can’t have it.
Riley Wilson: Yeah.
Catherine Anderson: So many of the associations we have with those two categories are really, really arbitrary. They’re totally socially constructed, and then that social construction kind of gets fixed, and then we think it’s natural when really it’s just arbitrary, and we’re used to it.
Riley Wilson: And I think that’s like, it’s something that me and Dr. Ritz has talked about as well a little bit, is kind of pointing out like one way to respond is also just pointing out the ridiculousness, like the nail thing.
Catherine Anderson: Right. It’s like, why shouldn’t I think they’re nails?
Riley WIlson: It’s like an inherent assumption, but then all of a sudden when you’re like, wait, like that, why, why? Like everybody has nails. It’s kind of like, it’s a little bit funny, these arbitrary things.
Catherine Anderson: Of course.
Riley Wilson: And pointing that out is kind of like, it takes away the seriousness and the unconscious things that happen in people’s minds.
Catherine Anderson: I hope so.
Yeah. I hope so. I hope that neighbor was like, oh, why not? Yeah.
You know, if someone’s really committed, you might not be able to get through, but yeah. And then people make the argument, well, it’s not natural. You know, the binary is what’s natural.
And you look at the non-human species in the world, and there is so much gender variability among non-human species, right? I was reading about eels. There’s one kind of eels, which kind of eels is it? Anyway, some species of eels where they’re all born male.
Riley Wilson: Yeah.
Catherine Anderson: All of them are male. And then some of them become female later.
Riley Wilson: Yeah.
And it’s, you know, and it’s in humans as well. So yeah.
Catherine Anderson: Exactly.
So that’s the other thing that the insistence that the binary is what’s natural or it’s just biology is a really ill-informed understanding. Like there’s good, accessible science out there showing that there’s a lot of variability in how gender is encoded and expressed in humans and in many species.
Riley Wilson: Yeah.
Yeah. So we’ve kind of gotten into it already just to like wrap it up. Like, finally, like I think that what happens a lot because like in female dominated like online communities and in person is people want to relate to each other and they want to laugh about their shared experiences.
Catherine Anderson: Yeah.
Riley Wilson: But like lately we have seen some trends online having to do with, you know, really gender essentialist things that are, you know, for example, girl math, girl dinner, I’m just a girl, something that maybe like my Gen Z viewers, if anybody is watching it, will be familiar with.
Catherine Anderson: Yeah.
Riley Wilson: And all of them are kind of infantilizing of women. And they also kind of, they use markers and aesthetics that create, I think also like a hegemonic view of who has access to this idea of girlhood. And so usually it’s like maybe there’s Stanley cups or something, or, you know, it’s usually markers of like upper class white women as well.
And so it serves not only to create a kind of a bridge around the female experience to infantilize women, but also to create an idea of what, who has access to girlhood. So what are your thoughts on that?
Catherine Anderson: Affluent, white, thin women, right? So the girl dinner is a good example. Like, oh, well, if there’s nobody else around, if my boyfriend isn’t home, if my husband isn’t home, I’m just going to eat girl dinner because I’m just a girl and girl dinner is like cheese and crackers or something, or a bowl of shreddies.
Riley Wilson: Grapes
Catherine Anderson: Sometimes I have a bowl of shreddies for supper. It’s because I don’t feel like cooking. It’s not because, well, okay, I don’t have a husband, sorry.
That’s a tangent we can take out or not. Right, grapes. So on the one hand, it encodes, it’s not worth the time to make a healthy meal if there’s not a man around to eat it. So that’s part of it. Well, I’m not worthwhile, but also, well, I’m not going to eat that much because I need to stay thin because thin is what’s feminine and thin is what’s pretty. And it’s important for girls to be pretty.
All of that fat phobia is encoded in that as well.
The girl math one just gets my goat. So I forget if I was a teenager or already an adult when the high school Barbie came out.
There was a Barbie who came out who was going to school. She had her notebooks and her walker combination. And one of the things her pre-recorded voice said was, “math class is tough.”
And so this was a big scandal that Barbie was saying math class is tough because it was reinforcing negative stereotypes about girls struggling with math. So for my generation, that was quite shocking to buy into the stereotype of girls being bad at math. When there are so many cultural factors that contribute to why girls, I’m not saying they’re bad at math, why girls score lower in math classes, which is not the same thing as being bad at math, right? There’s so many cultural factors that feed into that.
So then to have young women online acting out being bad at math, really, I have a hard time responding with compassion to that because choosing to reinforce those stereotypes just makes me cross. To participate in your own oppression makes me cross.
But again, as you say, it’s thin, pretty white women who can afford to participate in that because they’re probably going to have a man who’s going to take care of them, right? Someone’s going to marry them.
Okay, I’m being really uncharitable now.
I think women who are racialized, women who are disabled, women who are fat, women who are trans, if they were to go online and talk about, oh, I did girl math because I needed this new purse, we’d still be horrified at that, right?
Riley Wilson: They’re perceived very differently.
Catherine Anderson: We’d react to that the same way we react to Barbie. You can’t say that about that class of people, but it’s okay when it’s white girls who say it.
Riley Wilson: No, it’s that process of like, it’s all in good fun and it’s kind of like a joke, but then also really interrogating ourselves.
Catherine Anderson: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So, right. So in response to, oh, well, it’s just a joke. So you, right.
The girls talking about girl math at the mall, whatever, they’re probably joking and they can afford to make those jokes because they’ve got the privilege. Yeah. A whole lot of other categories of women can’t afford to make those jokes because other people are saying those things in earnest about them.
Riley Wilson: Yeah.
Catherine Anderson: Oh, that, that this category of women is bad at X like that. That is a stigma that lots of women still have to fight.
And so don’t have capacity to make jokes about their weakness in math.
Yes. I’m glad you brought that up about the jokes because some people, oh, well, it’s just a joke, but still only certain people can afford to joke.
Riley Wilson: Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, just getting, getting started to not only interrogate other people, but also ourselves. Yeah.
If you’re trying to be an ally to trans women in, in, or, you know, women have different experiences than yourself, because I think like, that’s something that I’ve had to kind of work on as well.
Catherine Anderson: Yeah. Yeah.
And if you’re participating in that joke about girl math and girl dinner, probably you’re not going to experience much harm from it, but other women are going to experience harm.
Riley Wilson: Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. Great. I think that’s like most of the conversation I want to get through.
If you have any final thoughts, let me know.
Catherine Anderson: Final thoughts, smash the patriarchy.
Riley Wilson: Yeah. Let’s go for it. Patriarchy.
Catherine Anderson: Well, do you want to say something to boys and men? Like boys and men have a role in resisting these harmful rhetorics as well.
That’s no, especially if you’re in the privilege class of like, if you’re,
um, how do I want to say it?
Um, there are some people in the world who will take you more seriously because you’re a guy. And so use that privilege to speak out, to, to call out the misogynist jokes and the transphobic jokes or the transphobic things that aren’t jokes that are attacks.
Riley Wilson: Yeah.
Catherine Anderson: Yeah. Like you, patriarchy is bad for men and boys also. Um, and it’s really great when men and boys participate in resisting it.
Riley Wilson: Yeah. Yeah. Cause it’s, it’s, it’s very helpful as well.
And yeah. Okay. That was a great last thought. Thank you so much.
Catherine Anderson: As a mother of sons. Yeah.
Yeah. Like two moms, two sons. We’re like so often we’re like, don’t be that guy.
Riley Wilson: Yeah.
Catherine Anderson: And then we have a conversation about what, what’s that guy and how do you not be that guy? Yeah. It’s a lot.
Riley Wilson: Yeah. Thank you so much for talking with me.
Catherine Anderson: Yeah. Let me know when your thing is done
