Making (non)Sense of Gender In T. Froese & M. Cappuccio, eds. Enactive Cognition at the Edge of Sense-Making: Making Sense of Non-Sense, part of the series: New Directions in Cognitive Science. Palgrave-MacMillan, 285-306. Michele Merritt Arkansas State University Introduction To begin, let us consider a particularly intriguing tale of nonsense. The Story of X, by Lois Gould (1972/1978), is the fictional account of a family, the Joneses, who decide to raise a genderless baby as part of a “very important secret scientific Xperiment.” Mr. and Mrs. Jones were given an official instruction manual so that they knew how to treat little baby X, but trouble ensued when people beyond the immediate family tried to interact with the baby. As might be expected, no one knew what to say, what toys to buy, or what pronouns to use in describing X. And no one knew what to buy for baby X. “The cousins who had sent a tiny football helmet could not come and visit any more. And the neighbors who sent a pink-flowered romper suit pulled their shades down when the Joneses passed their house.” In school, X dresses androgynously and X’s parents refuse to tell the teachers X’s gender. The story finally comes to a head when the parents of the other little boys and girls hold an emergency meeting with the principal, demanding that the Joneses make X’s gender known. X is causing problems, they proclaim. The story ends happily, however, when all the Xperts deem Baby X to be perfectly normal, despite the protests from the other parents. Once scientific officials determine X to be a normal baby of neither female nor male sexual identity, everyone suddenly accepts X. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there exist real-world versions of The Story of X, such as baby Storm and baby Sasha (cf. Poisson, 2011; Alleyne, 2012). Storm, born to parents in Canada, who decided not to reveal the sex of their baby to anyone, has fueled reactions ranging all the way from outrage, fear, and disgust to support and even praise for the couple and their decision. Sasha, who was recently revealed to be a boy, after five years of waiting from the rest of the world, caused a similar stir. His mother explains her experiences: “In the mother and baby group I was the last person to introduce myself and I said: ‘I’m Beck, and this is Sasha. And of course somebody said straight away: ‘So is it a boy or a girl?’ I said: ‘I’m not going to tell you. I discovered later that I’d been described as ‘that loony woman who doesn’t know whether her baby is a boy or a girl.’ And I could never persuade anyone in the group to come round for coffee. They just thought I was mental.” This very brief sketch of what I will henceforth refer to as ‘nonsensical gender’ – i.e. when there is a failure to adopt, adapt to, recognize, or enact the typical norms associated with one’s gender as it is conceived within a binary of male versus female – serves to illustrate the overarching theme of the following paper. The complex web of dress codes, rules of interactions, acceptable discourse, sexual behaviors, and even food and drink preferences that comprise gender is a phenomenon, I will argue, that deserves more attention. Granted, much attention has already been paid to this topic within gender theory or feminist philosophy; however, my aim is to bring the discussion into the arena of cognitive science, where, until recently, it has been