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?
From an evolutionary point of view, having genders/sexes is just a way of shuffling DNA. Species without sex and different genders, they exist, for example there are parthenogenic lizards, are composed of clonal lines. They have very restricted genetic diversity, and if their environment changes, they are at greater risk of extinction. While the environment is stable, parthenogenic reproduction is more efficient, females making clones of themselves, which is why it occurs, but it is a bad long-term strategy. The "Blind Watchmaker" and the several billion years of the history of life are responsible for the existence of gender. How easy it is to ignore that amount of history is difficult to say, though the human mind is very diverse and malleable.