Obama the gender bender?

Is Obama the first woman president? No.

Unless there is something he’s hiding from the public, President Obama is a biological male. Which means he has a Y chromosome, among other male-only physical features. While race is increasingly difficult to fence in with easy definitions, sex still has mostly rigid boundaries. This is perhaps why Toni Morrison was able to call Bill Clinton the first black president. In her 1998 New Yorker article she described him as such by highlighting certain tropes of blackness that he displayed: “single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.” But unlike race, sex is not defined by cultural signals. It can be played with, but that usually means changing from one side to the other. While race can be mixed, self-defined, sex is still mainly a binary. And Obama is squarely on one side.

But this is not an issue of biology and sex; it’s about gender and associated characteristics. Obama is the first female president not because people think he has a vagina, but because they think he is feminine. This, by definition, means that some people believe that there are specific traits that are fundamentally womanly. Martin Linsky of Newsweek has “five important ways” Obama displays his womanness: “inclusiveness in problem solving, deep optimism, modesty about knowing the answers, the courage to deliver uncomfortable news, not taking on all the work alone, and a willingness to air dirty linen.” This woman sounds an awful lot like Pollyanna. But it gets worse. Ralph Alter of The American Thinker has other reasons : “Obama is filled with sensitivity…, he would rather talk than fight, is highly…compassionate and to top it all off, he has a finely tuned sense of fashion.” Beyond the fact that Alter’s goal here is to claim that the “Obama administration fights like a girl” in order to discredit it (he must have missed Joan of Arc and Annie Oakley), these men are talking about gender definitions. Kathleen Parker, the latest to join in the meme, tries to dance around the issue much more delicately. She points out that she personally doesn’t think his “doing things a woman’s way” is a deficiency, yet feels our “cultural expectations” of what a leader should be do not include “coalition building” and talking it out. (Or really, talking at all--Obama is such a “chatterbox”!)

Inclusiveness, optimism, sensitivity, communication. (I will just ignore his sense of fashion.) These are very similar to the traits ascribed to female executives, regulators, and politicians when arguments are made that women in high places bring better results than men. But both claims boil us down to stereotypes by asserting that women share certain traits. It assumes that half the world’s population possesses a set of defining characteristics, a certain femininity that can be labeled. Is a pessimistic woman manly? Must I be sensitive to truly be female? Women differ from each other, not just from men. And it’s okay that we do.

The notion that Obama is feminine doesn't only do a disservice to women. It offends men as well. The authors feel men don’t (or shouldn’t) possess certain female-associated characteristics. A sensitive man? How homosexual. An optimistic man? How naïve. Are men really all that negative, unwilling to talk it out, so clueless when it comes to fashion? Is the U.S. really unable to handle a president who builds coalitions instead of being The Decider? Parker has a hard time believing her own assertion that these womanly traits are “an evolutionary achievement” (she spends the rest of her article attacking him for his desire to talk it out). But isn’t it possible that a more “evolved” man--or one could say modern, or well-adapted--is one that is able to pull from the playbooks of femininity and masculinity? And still know that he is a man?

Hilary Clinton didn’t get the party nomination because she’s too manly. Obama is losing popularity because he’s too female. These are assessments made by talking heads, but is it really what the American people think? Are we really unable to recognize that these two are men and women, no matter how they act? -Bryce Covert

Bryce Covert is a journalist and blogger who writes on feminism, politics, and the energy industry. She has a B.A. in literature from Brown University and you can find her at www.brycecovert.com and www.twitter.com/brycecovert.