September 7, 2023
“Humankind is masculine and feminine, not just man or woman. You can hardly say of your soul what sex it is.”
My seminar on Integrating the Masculine and Feminine in Self & Society starts at 9am tomorrow, Portland time. There’s still time to register! A Zoom link for the live classes is sent automatically upon registration, as is the login for the community forum where people are already sharing some extraordinary thoughts. (I’m so impressed by the quality of being and thinking everyone brings to these gatherings.)
While this seminar is not a gender studies course and won’t be focused explicitly on the politics of gender, I’m endlessly aware that the personal is political. All of our conversations on the psychological experience of gender and the Jungian concepts will occur against the backdrop of patriarchy and the policing of gender and gender expression worldwide, be it around trans rights, gay rights, women’s rights, abortion rights, or the widespread toxic assertion that masculinity and “real men” are misogynistic, unfeeling, and dominant.
It’s important for those of us who are cis-gendered and heterosexual to speak about our own gender confusion or gender struggles. Most cis-hetero people I know have questioned, at one time or another, their gender and sexuality, even if in vaguer terms than emerges for many gay and trans people. Jung’s work provides a framework for a greater understanding of these questions for all of us. Indeed, his questions and his awareness of the absence of the feminine in his life were core to his own psychology, healing, and his subsequent body of work.
Cis, straight men and women still experience confusion about how to inhabit their bodies in public, including sorting out what aspects of self need to be cut out or enhanced, what kind of gender performance is required, and what gendered expectations for our lives we’ve adhered to, unwittingly, despite being potentially ill-fitting for our souls.
The work of LGBTQ+ people on the margins has repeatedly made it more possible for cis, straight people like myself to thrive and be individuals in our own rights. It’s an unfair arrangement of labor and benefits. The more on the margins a person is, the less possible it is to suppress the self and survive, so the struggle is often life or death. This struggle, this revolution and search for expansion, results in benefits for everyone. But it needn’t be this lopsided. All of us would benefit from more cis-hetero people acknowledging the confusion around gender and the compromises we need to make to navigate a patriarchal world.
It’s a complicated and devastating moment in history when it comes to the policing of gender (566 pieces of anti-trans legislation have been introduced in the United States this year alone while women fight to regain basic reproductive rights), but it’s a remarkably beautiful moment too.
I say that it’s a beautiful moment culturally around gender because we’re seeing more and more people reclaim the pre-colonial, pre-white supremacist lens on gender in which the binary isn’t a codified, “biological,” absolutist truth. Again, as much as Jung contradicts himself throughout his writing on this topic, he also recognized all over the place, from alchemy to mythology, that the greatest goals and Gods transcend the binary. They’re the “hermaphrodites,” the “androgens,” or the coniunctio. They’re the transcendent third.
There is oh so much to explore. I fear that even in eight sessions, we’ll only scratch the surface. But I can’t wait to begin.
XO, Satya
Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies