Hey all,
So I'm looking to take an active step here to understand better some things that my straight/white/cis/middle-aged male brain has had a tough time wrapping itself around, particularly in the gender identity front.
I'm working from the understanding of physical sex as the bio-bits and the expressed identity as being separate things, so that part is easy enough.
What's confusing to me though is like this. If we take gender as being an expression of your persona, a set of traits that define one as male, female, or some combination of both then what function does a title/pronoun serve? To assume that some things are masculine or feminine traits seems to put unneeded rigidity to things.
We've had men or women who enjoy things traditionally associated with the other gender for as long as there have been people I expect. If that's the case then what purpose does the need for a gender title serve?
I'll admit personally questioning some things like fairness in cis/trans integrated sports, but that's outside what I'm asking here. Some things like bathroom laws are just society needing to get over itself in thinking our personal parts are all that special.
Certainly not trying to stir up any fights, just trying to get some input from people that have a different life experience than myself. Is it really as simple as a preferred title?
Edit: Just wanted to take a second to thank all the people here who took the time to write some truly extensive thoughts and explanations, even getting into some full on citation-laden studies into neurology that'll give me plenty to digest. You all have shown a great deal of patience with me updating some thinking from the bio/social teachings of 20+ years back. ๐
I suppose my followup to that would be what gives someone a specific sense of gender? To say 'I am a woman' is taking societies interpretation of woman as being right. What differentiates that from 'I am a man who likes womanly things'?
What separates the 'tomboy' woman from a trans-masc?
(Please excuse any terminology missteps if I use things wrong too)
I'm 7 years transitioned and I can't answer that question for you.
It's not something I rationalised myself in to. It makes no sense. It just is. It's important to remember that you don't need to understand to accept.
A lot of these comments have also muddied my understanding of terms now which originally took on a neat physical/psychological = sex/gender split. Looking about the web that still seems to be the common delineation but like the range of people on the planet there are personal interpretations and flavors to such things too.
I get the suspicion that some of the more spirited discussions so far came with a tinge of suspicion that I'm one of the bad folks looking to invade spaces and sow discord, but that's not the case. For me it's not a question of acceptance, but really of understanding something foreign to me. I'm a hyper-logical type, does engineering things for fun, 'feels-like' for me could be pretty directly translated as 'makes rational sense' to the point where many get frustrated.
The psychological is rooted in the neurobiological. Psychological can rarely be cleanly separated from the physical. For example, autopsies show some parts of the brain that were thought of as reliable predictors of sex actually correlate much better with gender. And its not just a matter of hormones changing it: trans people who never medically transition are the same as cis people of their gender. Likewise, trans people sometimes experience phantom limb syndrome for parts they've never had. And trans women who have bottom surgery basically never had phantom limb syndrome, despite cis men who lose their member often do. Medical transitioning is largely about changing one's sex to match one's gender. Additionally, physical markers are part of how people initially gender people. You don't need to medical transition to be trans, or even want to transition medically, but its an extremely common desire.
I think you also are misreading some peoples comments For example: https://lemmy.socdojo.com/comment/1596353 What you replied to was focused on the social construct that is sex, yet you bring up gender in ways that seem unrelated to the comment you replied to and seem to be conflating the two constructs more than anyone else I've seen in the thread.
Also, a lot of mainstream discussion does a bad job at representing a lot of trans people. For example, a lot of trans people don't want you to ask their pronouns: they want to be at the point where people instinctually gender them correctly. And some closeted trans people don't want to be asked their pronouns because it either forced them to misgender themselves or come out of the eggshell when they may not be ready for it. Yet the mainstream discussion by allies often misses such nuances. Another example is the "trans people know they're a [boy/girl] since they were a toddler and fit childhood gender expectations" narrative, which is quite harmful to a lot of eggs who assume they're not trans just because they didn't fit that narrative and also leads to people being confused about trans women who are tomboys, trans men who are femboys, and/or why tomboys and femboys aren't all just trans. But it helps sell a narrative emotionally, so that's what a lot of people repeat.
IMO, that's part of the problem. I'm generally the same way, which is why I often get annoyed at myself for being happy about things that make no rational sense. Gender isn't something that can be understood logically yet in my limited experience.
That would be part of it, or more aptly that a bit of the commentary on sex refers to it as a construct. When I think of constructs it brings to mind more the social expectations and acknowledged norms. While the notion of sex as being a binary thing might be taken as a construct in itself, how I've been approaching it is that sex is a set of largely fixed (short of external intervention) tangible and measurable traits, physical things. How we might interpret them is perhaps another matter. So some of it is I guess just a missed communication on some of what I'm asking.
I often wish I could shut off the rationalizing and analytical part of my mind, though at least I make active efforts to counter balance it with more free-form things in the off time.