Overview of Who Invented Gender? Amanda with ALOK
This episode of We Can Do Hard Things is a wide-ranging, history-driven argument that gender is not a timeless biological truth but a social system built, marketed, enforced, and repeatedly rewritten by power. Amanda traces how gender roles, clothing, colors, family structures, and “natural” expectations were invented and remade across history, then speaks with poet and performer Alok Vaid-Menon about transness, freedom, imagination, and why liberation has to be about more than safety.
Core Argument: Gender Is a Social Construct, Not an Eternal Fact
The episode’s central thesis is that what many people treat as “natural” gender roles are actually:
- historically contingent
- politically useful
- economically profitable
- culturally enforced through religion, science, law, and media
Amanda argues that societies often disguise their customs as nature, and once a rule is framed as “natural,” it becomes much harder to question.
Historical Examples Used to Show How Gender Was Invented and Reassigned
The pink/blue color binary was made up
The episode uses the color-coding of children’s clothes as a concrete example of how gender norms change:
- For centuries, babies wore mostly white regardless of sex.
- In the early 1900s, some sources even suggested pink for boys and blue for girls.
- By the mid-20th century, manufacturers and retailers had flipped the script and locked in pink for girls, blue for boys.
- The shift was driven in part by marketing and profit, not biology.
Clothing and fashion were once gender-fluid
Amanda points out that items now coded as feminine were historically associated with wealthy men, including:
- high heels
- lace wigs
- makeup
- perfume
This is used to show how easily societies can relocate “masculine” and “feminine” traits when power and fashion change.
World War II exposed the flexibility of gender roles
During WWII:
- millions of American women entered the workforce
- women worked in factories, shipyards, and weapons production
- the culture temporarily embraced Rosie the Riveter
After the war, women were pushed back into domesticity to restore the postwar social order, especially for middle-class white women.
Patriarchy, Property, and the Rise of Gender Control
Amanda argues that gender hierarchy became especially rigid after societies settled into agriculture and property ownership.
What changed with property
Once humans accumulated:
- land
- livestock
- stored grain
- wealth
societies became obsessed with:
- inheritance
- paternity
- marriage
- controlling women’s reproductive lives
The episode emphasizes that gender categories became useful to states because they made taxation, inheritance, military service, and family regulation easier.
The family became a political institution
Amanda and Alok both connect patriarchy to property law:
- the family was shaped around ownership
- women’s roles were narrowed to control lineage and inheritance
- gender became a tool of governance, not just identity
Gender Diversity Has Always Existed
A major part of the episode is devoted to showing that non-binary and trans lives are not modern inventions.
Examples cited include
- Ancient Mesopotamia/Sumer: Inanna/Ishtar traditions with gender transformation themes and gender-nonconforming priesthood members
- Ancient Rome: the galli priests of Cybele, who adopted feminine presentation and names
- Indonesia: Bugis society, with multiple genders and social roles
- India: Hijras in recognized ceremonial and court roles
- Hawaii: mahu
- Samoa: fa’afafine
- West Africa: gender-expansive social categories
- Indigenous North America: Two-Spirit traditions
The point is that many cultures historically recognized more than two genders and treated gender diversity as part of reality, not pathology.
Intersex reality
The episode also highlights intersex people as evidence that biology itself is not strictly binary:
- around 1–2% of people are born intersex
- many intersex infants are subjected to non-consensual surgeries to make bodies conform to binary expectations
Science, Religion, and Colonialism Helped Solidify the Binary
Amanda argues that patriarchy was reinforced by several powerful systems:
Aristotle and “natural hierarchy”
Aristotle is presented as a major thinker who helped turn social hierarchy into “nature,” claiming:
- men were more rational and active
- women were emotional and passive
- women were incomplete versions of men
Victorian pseudoscience
Later “scientific” claims reinforced the same ideas, such as:
- women’s brains being smaller and therefore inferior
- education harming women’s reproductive capacity
- male/female traits being observed in animals to justify human hierarchy
Colonialism erased local gender systems
European colonizers often:
- imposed patriarchy on societies with different inheritance and family structures
- criminalized Indigenous and South Asian gender-expansive people
- replaced matrilineal or community-based systems with male-headed legal models
Nazi destruction and modern book bans
The episode draws a line from:
- the Nazi destruction of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science
- to modern book banning, especially LGBTQ+ and BIPOC books
The larger message: when power fears reality, it tries to destroy records of reality.
The Conversation with Alok: Transness as Creativity, Not Just Survival
Amanda’s interview with Alok Vaid-Menon shifts the focus from explanation to possibility.
Key ideas from Alok
Transness is a creative act
Alok describes transness as the freedom to:
- give birth to oneself
- dress in ways that feel beautiful
- love openly
- reclaim one’s own pleasure
The fight is bigger than trans rights
Alok reframes anti-trans attacks as part of a broader war against:
- creative self-expression
- wonder
- whimsy
- imagination
“Soul first” thinking
Rather than obsessing over categories, Alok argues for seeing people as:
- souls
- complex beings
- full of contradictions and histories
The body matters, but it is not the full truth of a person.
Love, not just solidarity
Alok argues for moving beyond a narrow politics of identity and into:
- love
- mercy
- empathy
- kinship
They suggest that many people are trapped in binary thinking because they are afraid, lonely, or looking for belonging through exclusion.
Shared Themes in the Conversation
Community over opposition
Both speakers criticize political identity built only around what we are against.
Instead, they call for:
- mutual aid
- interdependence
- public housing and material care
- real belonging without scapegoats
History as liberation
They repeatedly return to the idea that knowing history helps people realize:
- their loneliness has precedent
- their distress is often structural, not personal failure
- “impossible” freedoms have existed before and can exist again
Storytelling as an ancient technology
Alok and Amanda celebrate oral tradition, storytelling, and ancestral memory as tools for:
- teaching
- healing
- connecting generations
- resisting isolation and misinformation
Notable Takeaways
- Gender has been repeatedly invented, revised, and marketed as “natural.”
- Color codes, clothing, and domestic roles are cultural decisions, not biological laws.
- Gender diversity is ancient, global, and well-documented.
- Patriarchy is tied to property, inheritance, colonialism, and control.
- Transness is presented as a source of creativity, freedom, and truth.
- Liberation requires not just critique, but imagination, love, and community.
Memorable Ideas
- “Gender is a game many people are playing without knowing they’re playing.”
- “The status quo is the scam.”
- “Transness is not just identity; it is imagination.”
- “The project is not cis vs. trans — it’s soul first.”
- “We are not just fighting for rights; we are fighting for reality.”
Final Message
The episode ends on a hopeful but urgent note: if gender was made, it can be remade. If hierarchy was invented, it can be dismantled. And if people are willing to learn history, love each other more deeply, and stop mistaking marketing for nature, then a freer future is possible.