The negatively androgynous state of Wallis Simpson 21.01.2012
For students starting PSYA3 and getting to grips with the development of gender, physical and psychological androgyny might seem somewaht detached from the mainstream cogntive theories of Larry Kohlberg and the social learning theories of Albert Bandura. However, the current media trawl for what lies beneath the surface of behaviour might hold useful currency in explaining gender diversity. Film-makers fascination for biopics such as the Kings' Speech, The Iron Lady and more recently W.E. directed with more than a little self-indulgent subjectivity by Madonna allows us a rare insight into the negatively androgynous state of Wallis Simpson especially when viewed alongside the work of Anna Sebba and her book "That Woman". As an early reporter with Reuters News Agency, Anna Sebba recalls with effortless clarity and understanding that although Wallis Simpson was seen as being difficult and unable to fit the social requirements this was not simply temperament but as a result of predominantly male attributes trapped within the body of a female who, struggling to express herself as biologially determined, became seriously constrained within conventions of the time.

So different for women of today with the literature suggesting that psychological health is easier to maintain when not having to suppress the natual determinants of the body, whilst for Wallis this was further compounded by the relentless demands to retain thiness, so essential in controlling weight that would accentuate maleness, especially in containment of a jaw line that attracted unhelpful comments. It could be argued that Wallis was biologically directed as much as she was psychologically motivated by ambition and the need to free herself from the financial insecurity of childhood that was to accompany her throughout her first two unhappy marriages. Perhaps the woman who started life as Bessiewallis Warfield and ended it as `that woman' the Duchess of Windsor, with a man equally prone to psychological shortcomings provides us with a subtle but compelling mismatch of gender identity and assigned biological gender role, to be seen more overtly on screen with Hilary Swank playing the disphoric Brandon in "Boys Don't Cry".

The androgyny of Bloom in Joyce's Ulysses makes even more practical sense of this separation which is often felt but not easily explained, offering students a synoptic hook that not only gives it sharper relevance but additional academic crediblity. Written in 1904 some seventy years earlier than the explanations put forward by Sandra Bem as `being in both worlds male and female', it is a useful gender development milestone because according to psychologists it is far better for mental health than the stereotypical constraints attached to being socially constructed. Here James Joyce's charge of a character having the bloodlessly pious face of someone on his way to priesthood, might expose the fate of gender stereotypes condemned to being unable to embrace androgyny as the way they see the world but instead forced to live their life as a social construct. Consequently, Sandra Bem's 1974 Sex Role Inventory has much more mileage for students when answering some of the more demanding A2 Psychology questions. It may have seemed appropriate commentary at the time but the pain of androgyny and the stark differences posed by gender stereotyping when your gender identity is different from the gender assigned to you at birth, could lead to a life of unutterable denial since it is only the positively androgynous people and not the negatively androgynous who have the potential to live the more complete life that Bem had envisaged. Perhaps this might eventually come to define a more human standard of physical health and psychological well being, something that was never quite within reach of Wallis Simpson at the beginning of the twentieth century.