My Gender is a Fish by Carter Gwertzman
My Gender is a Fish is, unsurprisingly, about gender; but it is about gender in a surprising way. At the beginning of your tale, after briefly establishing that we are in a society in which failing to live up to your biological gender identity is a reason for social ostracism, we learn that our own gender is stolen. We then enter the woods, which are a metaphor for the dangerous realm of self-discovery that we enter when we leave the ready-made interpretations of Das Man (the They) behind, and are presented with a series of choices about what our gender is; symbolic choices, choices that have nothing to do with man/woman and everything with the role that gender plays in our life. In the end, we’ll always end up saying, in one poetic way or another: it’s complicated. I’m not there yet, but I’m moving towards it.
I tend to think of myself as someone who doesn’t have a strong gender identity. I’m biologically male, I’m fine with that, but I don’t see it as terribly important to who I am and I kind of resent it when other people do claim it is important to who I am.
I say this with some caution. After all, it is hard to be sure that your gender identity is unimportant to you if you’ve never been in a situation where it was changed or challenged. And it’s also hard to be aware of all the ways that your perceived gender structures how society reacts to you. Still – it’s not easy for me to imagine myself in the situation where gender itself would be a struggle for me (as opposed to the situation where living in sexist conditions would be a struggle for me, which I find very easy to imagine), because it’s hard for me to understand what it’s like to experience gender as deeply meaningful to one’s own identity.
I’m saying this because it’s important for understanding my relationship to Gwertzman’s piece. On the one hand, it made the game more fascinating to me, because Gwertzman does a great job of cataloguing some of the ways in which gender can be experienced. Indeed, it made me want much more – a richer fictional exploration of these abstract scenarios. On the other hand, I think it makes me a lousy critic of the game. If you want to know whether My Gender is a Fish does a good job of evoking the different ways in which gender can be experienced, I’m among the last people to ask.