Published on 12, July, 2020
A discussion in this forum made me ask myself this question, what's gender?. I googled it but what I found there didn't make much sense to me. I always thought that the gender of the other person doesn't tell me much about who they are. It just informs me about the appropriate pronouns that this person wants me to use with them. Frankly I don't care about figuring out my gender. I was born in a woman's body and I never felt like it's the wrong one. I think I'd feel the same if I was born in a man's body. I have never spent time thinking about this part of myself because I never thought that it's important enough to me. I'll be the same person anyway, no? I don't think it would change much about who I am... Can anyone share how they understand gender?
I'll just make a glossary type post of it because people's own understanding of gender often gets confused for biological sex, so I should point out the science based reasons why for me they are two entirely separate things.
"male" & "female, and in fact all words: a social construct, all arbitrarily applied to things as homosapiens evolved a language system to improve communication.Simplified but imperfect biological sex (what a midwife calls at the birth) : penis = "male" vagina = "female" (gonadal sex)Simplified but unreliable (GCSE level) scientific understandig of biological sex: xx = f, xy = m (genotypic sex)Better researched (advanced) scientific understanding of biological sex: Genotypic (See also karotype) sex +/vs Phenotypic sex +/vs Gonadal sex existing in a range that includes intersex individuals.Gender: a social construct that is either A. performative based on societal expectations and stereotypes of B. essentialist, the idea that a single sex charicateristic = gender (unreliable since most people don't walk around with their genitals out or have their chromosomes tested to identify with any certainty*. and C. Identative ( see below)Gender Identity: the Gender you feel you are. Which as a social construct can literally be anything."sex change" (physical transition): technically does change sex as most people's understanding of sex is gonadal based, thus change/remove the gonads of the traditionally associated sex, and you change the sex of the individual.*Arguments against this who claim xx and xy and reproductive essentialism are also usually in for a surprise when they discover things like this occurr https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24313430/ a lot more frequently than one may think.And further reading:https://www.joshuakennon.com/the-six-common-biological-sexes-in-humans/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the-idea-of-2-sexes-is-overly-simplistic1/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2020/06/15/the-myth-of-biological-sex/?sh=8ccd5b976b9bhttps://www.hrc.org/resources/seven-things-about-transgender-people-that-you-didnt-knowhttps://slowrevealgraphs.com/2021/11/08/rate-of-left-handedness-in-the-us-stigma-society/
That’s really helpful, thanks! I’ll confess to a certain laziness around researching precise definitions at the level of science - I can just see the increasing fluidity within a continuum manifest societally in myriad ways that point out where we’re going. But a bit of precision via your list (patiently spoon feeding people this stuff must be trying at times but please persevere!) will help me understand the nuts and bolts of it. In which the ‘nuts’ are not always as important as they seem of course!