Gender anxiety disorder and celebrity culture

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Ah, the celebrity fetish.  Clearly on display last night as millions and millions of people across the globe tuned in to watch what can only be described as one of the most boring television events of the year: the Oscars.   We sit in front of our temples (TVs) to see our gods and goddesses on display in ritualistic costumes invoking the sacred prayers of  ”Thank you to all of you.  I love you.  Each and every one of you” and, of course, see the divine costumes that elevate them to Divine status or send them crashing into the bowels of fashion hell.

Of course, we study our celebrities not just online, but in the celebrity magazines as well.  These weekly catechisms of who wore what and who is with whom and who is not instruct us in all we need to know about our gods and goddesses in Hollywood.  But celebrity rags offer other lessons as well.  This week we learned about a the pervasiveness of a disease that I will call Gender Anxiety Disorder.  GAD is not yet an official psychiatric disorder, but it should be.  Gender Anxiety Disorder is the obsessive concern with policing the boundary between “male” and “female” even in young children.

This week a forceful display of Gender Anxiety Disorder appeared in  Life and Style magazine.  The cover features two images of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s daughter,  Shiloh.  On the left, an image of her with shoulder length hair, on the right one with much shorter hair.  The title, in screaming yellow letters, asks

Why is Angelina turning Shiloh into a boy?”

The celeb rag goes on to say that:

Shiloh, sporting boys’ clothes and a new haircut so shockingly short it immediately ignited a firestorm of controversy. “Shiloh is pushing the boundaries of a tomboy look and crossing over to cross-dresser territory,” Alana Kelen, senior fashion stylist at VH1, tells Life & Style. Celebrity stylist Gili Rashal-Niv agrees. “I get that times are tough but does Angie really need to have Shiloh sharing clothes with her brothers? Hopefully we won’t be seeing Maddox in one of Shiloh’s dresses any time soon.”

Not wanting to rely on stylists alone to diagnose young Shiloh as having a “problem” with gender, the magazine turned to  ”parenting experts.”

Some parenting experts think that indulging Shiloh’s masculine behavior is a mistake. “Little girls have never been women before,” Glenn Stanton, director of Family Formation Studies at the conservative organization Focus on the Family, tells Life & Style. “They need help, they need guidance of what that looks like. It’s important to teach our children that gender distinction is very healthy.”

On the Focus on the Family website, we learn that

To be human is to be gendered — male or female. And one of the most important jobs of a parent is to help their children develop as healthy boys or girls and into strong, confident men and women.

We also learn that “tomboys” are not nearly as scary as “sissy boys” since masculinity requires a lot more work to establish.

There are important differences here. Tomboy behavior in girls is more prevalent and often more short-lived than distinct feminine behavior in boys. It is more important for parents to lovingly, calmly but confidently steer fem-boys into more masculine directions… All boys need to beintentionally welcomed into the world of men, and both mother and father play a key role here.

As much as I’d like such Gender Anxiety Disorder to be limited to celebrity rags and right-wing, Christian organizations, the truth is it is deeply rooted in the far more pervasive cultural paradigm of psychology.  According to the current DSM IV (the “bible” of all psychiatric diagnoses), children suffering from “gender identity disorder”  show a persistent desire to engage in the “opposite” gender’s activities.  Boys like to cook or play dress up; girls prefer contact sports.  Although the diagnosis is considered outdated by many in the psychiatric professions, with many accepting gender diversity as the best path to good mental health, being a tomboy (or a sissy boy) is still evidence of a psychiatric disorder.  Worse, it is not at all clear that “Gender Identity Disorder” will be removed from the next DSM, due in 2012.

It does seem rather perverse that we do not have a psychiatric diagnosis for the people at Focus on the Family or Life and Style magazine as mentally unstable for their Gender Anxiety Disorder.  Instead, grading Shiloh’s gender performance as ‘failing to be feminine” is considered “healthy” and even “Christian” while short hair and a collared shirt on a body born female are considered a “crisis.”  That’s sick.