Overgenderize

Overgenderizing is not merely a response ...

... in cultural assumptions that people accept it without question. A Gilligan, who comes from Harvard, and who expresses views that are consonant with traditional values, is an example of a powerful promulgator of ideas. Of course, she is only one of a long line of scientists who have been affected by bias. Often the scientist is unaware herself or himself. Sometimes the bias is lodged in the method of doing research. Today, for example, we are in danger of overgenderizing everything.

The new theorists are "overgenderizing," says Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, a sociologist at City University of New York. "Seeing distinctions and stereotyping are so much a part of our culture."

Several trans men and women clients told me they had embarrassed themselves (in retrospect) by overdoing their gender expression, overgenderizing via clothing or behavior. What they thought at the time were “typical” male or female behaviors (these clients later decided) were “too much.” Of course, it is common for adolescents to express themselves this way for a few years.

However, I would not agree with their dismissal of Freudian theory as completely reducing psychology to anatomy, nor, especially, would I concede to their view of the Künstlerroman as merely 'a pattern of spiritual development in male heroes [...] virtually unavailable to the young woman in the nineteenth-century novel'.16 This kind of feminist reading can dangerously 'overgenderize' genres to the explicit disadvantage of women's Künstlerinromane in order to make the feminist.