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?
Gender is … a word who’s meaning changes radically depending on context. Academically? Gender is a spectrum look let me give you a list of gender related qualities
every single one of these binary states can coexist in any combination. That’s 2^10 different ‘genders’ if you like. More colours than an old VGA monitor can display. A lot of these combinations are fairly common and would be recognised as either male or female by most people, but less common combinations exist or are theoretically possible and you could definitely go from ‘male’ to ‘female’ flipping one condition at a time just like you can go from red to blue through orange yellow and green.
but since most of the time people can be labeled as clearly male or female, even if you are say a man born with a vestigial uterus people will generally call you male. It’s even meaningful to trans people because most trans people want to go from being unambiguously labeled as one gender to the other. The reality is a lot get stuck in the middle between male and female depending on the definition of male / female you pick.
self identification as a definition just doesn’t work. There will always be a small number of people who self identify as gender A and walk, look, act and talk like gender B. People just won’t accept that. On one level it raises the very good question why should anyone have to look or act like a certain gender. On the other it’s stupid to assert gender is un important. For anyone who isn’t bisexual / asexual gender matters because it effects who they will or won’t have sex with.
this is what some trans women call the cotton ceiling. They go to gay bars where their friends end up hooking up with lesbians but they never do. Their lesbian friends reassure them that they are supported that no one at the bar would question their femininity. But that recognition doesn’t extend to the parts of their brain that govern sexual attraction. People, most people, are not attracted to a certain gender identity, they are attracted to a certain gendered body.
and yet there are trans people who do pass, who’s lovers wouldn’t know their bodies had changed if they weren’t told, in a functional sense their gender is different to those trans people who can’t pass and it drives many trans people crazy because those who pass have attained what most trans people want to attain.
we live in a society that has a desperate need to label people as male or female, a need born of reproduction and the base parts of our brains that handle reproduction. But the reality is there is no objective unambiguous functional binary definition of gender no matter how much society, and even trans people, wishes there were. The best you can possibly do is male / female / other and even then it’s not at all clear where the boundaries should or would be drawn. That would be a very subjective question.
so every time you are forced to address gender in a technical or legal context you really need to think about it as a spectrum in my view.