What even is gender?

[xToasty]

Now before you run my down with your pitchforks and shovels, hear me out here. A word of warning for deep philosophical thinking.

 

So, I've been thinking lately about what gender actually is. When you think about it, isn't it really just a name for stereotyping people? I dunno, maybe I'm just weird, but the way I'm starting to see it, gender is kinda subjective? Or something? How is a male different from a female from the mental side of things. "Oh, men are dominant and manly and whatever. Females are less dominant and like femininity," people say, but isn't that only the case because its been drilled into their head by society? If you had the two grow up away from the stereotypes, couldn't it be different? I know there are a lot of people who don't fit in the molds, but is there an immense mental difference between the two 'genders'? From what I know, correct me if I'm wrong, genderqueer people aren't biologically different to their assigned gender in any way, yet they still don't relate to it or anything.

So what is it that actually separates the genders? Genderqueer people always say, "My body wasn't the same as my gender." But what does that even mean? Your body is technically just a meat-sack to carry you around, so how can a meat-sack have a gender? Yeah, different meat-sacks look different, with different genitals and whatnot, but there's lots of differences between bodies, with size and colour and whatever else.

 

I might just sound like a crackpot fool, but I genuinely don't understand it. I've always thought I was a female, because that's what my body is, and I liked 'girly things' when I was younger, and I acted 'like a girl', but isn't that technically subjective on people's idea of 'female'? I don't know, maybe my gender-meter is broken, but I really don't understand it, now that I'm thinking about it. Please give me your thoughts, my reality is kinda falling apart right now.

[Scottthespy]

Its nice to see someone else thinking this way. I agree, for the most part. Your mind is who you are and your body is just what you look like, and if you don't feel good about how you look go ahead and change it to something you like better, whether that be a different hairstyle or a new vulva. 

 

I did see a video once about male and female brains being physically different...a different distribution of white and grey matter, which made for a trend towards more easily understanding certain things, which is where we get the 'men are analytical and aggressive' and 'women are nurturing and meek' stereotypes from. The video said that brains with a 'female' setup had been found in patients with male bodies, and vice versa, and this would explain gender dysphoria on the binary at least, because you'd have a brain swamped in the wrong mix of hormones for it, which would feel pretty damn 'off'. I'm sure I watched this video once and it made me think I had to be wrong about gender, but...I can't for the life of me find it again to check its sources. 

 

Even if that is the case, though, and brains do have certain 'setups' that trend towards different general mental abilities, I think 'gender' is a pointless and in some situations downright harmful thing to focus on. Putting so much effort and attention into it turns it into something super mega important, and then people who aren't involved think they have to get involved because of that importance, and it becomes a big 'issue' for people to take sides on, when really why should it be such a big deal? Do what you like to and can, look how you want, it's no one else's business why you want to change/stay the same. I feel like a world where people didn't feel their genitals defined their place in society in any way would be a world where dysphoria was lessened, because people wouldn't have the anxiety of others judging them based on their 'gender'. I feel like a world where sex  reassignment was looked at in the same way as other cosmetic surgeries (mostly is it safe, have they considered all the angles, and do they have the money for it) is a world where people don't feel so much pressure about whether or not to get those surgeries. 

 

This is all coming from some one who grew up without ever being given gender based reasons for why I had to or could not do a thing. Now, I don't actually care about, think about, or even really feel gender, and I think its because it was never a limiting factor on anything in my life. It never opened doors or closed them, so it matters as much to me as what colour socks I'm wearing, and given some of the posts here on aven I think I dodged a bullet with this thinking. I don't care what pronouns people use for me, thought its interesting to see what people will assume. Its freeing and pleasant to not have to worry about it at all.

[Guest]

I'm one of those people on aven that doesn't really "believe" in gender. I can understand the idea of it, but really. You have a body, and yes, you have a mind, but why is it that you should feel one way or the other? Why should male feel one way and female another? What makes one male and what makes one female? Why should I call myself trans or "not female" just because I don't "feel" like anything at all?

I don't mind others transitioning or doing whatever to feel better, that's none of my business, but I feel like gender is a result of the society still having old norms/stereotypes dragging along (not always obvious, takes time for things to completely go away in the minds of people) while people are getting more and more okay with expressing themselves. And then, when they don't feel like they fit into the mold/the idea of what something is, they want to call themselves something else.

 

"Cis" is also interesting, if you made everyone think really hard about how they feel, I'm unsure if cis would even be the majority. Aven is a place where gender is brought up a lot, heck, we even have a subforum for it! There used to be a big poll in the census about gender where less then 50% were cis (since I can't find it now I assume it's old and archived). Anyway, why would people outside aven be that different? Why is cis the correct way to be male/female when most people feel like they're not?

 

We're all different, and that doesn't mean that we're wrong or should have to change our appearance to "match how we feel".

 

I was all into that gender stuff when I first joined aven, I removed it a while ago because it's just plain pointless.

[Anonymous Axolotl]

You aren't alone; what you're saying makes a lot of sense to me. I've found "gender apathetic" applies to me since I haven't quite figured out what gender is supposed to mean as a feeling. I've never felt strongly about feeling like I am any gender, or lack thereof. For a time I thought I may be agender, gender neutral, genderless, or something of the like, but those also didn't seem right since I simply didn't feel like anything in particular needed to apply to me. I don't care how people perceive my gender.

 

Different cultures have different associations with certain genders, and some cultures have genders that don't even exist in other cultures. That's something that's always tripped me up about gender. If someone was born elsewhere in the world than their birth country, would they still have the same gender identity? With sexuality and romantic orientation, it seems like those don't have a cultural association, but gender seems to be heavily dependent on traditions and social norms, which vary from country to country.

 

I could be totally wrong, but that's how I see things. That being said, if someone feels strongly about a certain gender, I believe they should feel free to embrace it. It's not harming anyone.

 

I don't know if it's the same video that Scottthespy mentioned, but I have seen a video on the same topic as well.

[PoeciMeta]

That's a good question. Always wondered what's supposed to be the big deal with your 23rd pair of chromosomes. I don't have a gender, so I suppose I can't really speak here ¯\ _(ツ)_/¯ but then I'm dysphoric and thus refuse to be gendered so I'm not apathetic to it at all; and I guess having the notion of it is practical if I want to transition. 

[anisotrophic]

I used to consider gender almost entirely socially constructed, but now that I started T I think there is also a biological experience worth recognizing. It should not be "required" for identity, and not everyone will want it or can have it (eg for medical reasons, or because they don't want other consequences of hormonal transition).

 

Neither is it predictable; it's how each individual reacts when in a given hormonal context. For example, I'm sexual but have not had increased libido; my experience of hormonal masculinization is my own.

 

(In my case it seems to have less "worrying about others" and it's much more difficult to cry. I'm worried I turn into an asshole but I've been told I'm doing ok; I think I probably worried too much before.)

[PoeciMeta]

I just realised that the vagueness of gender by nature makes it hard to have any invalidation going on here and I appreciate it ^^

(There still is the 'is dysphoria required' debate but I don't see it used much to invalidate people here and that's SO cool.)

Not the case everywhere, but we have many people who acknowledge this vagueness and subjectivity~

[Rynn]

@AweSimSo I think you're talking about gender norms (which differ per culture, and are very subjective, for sure), and not really about gender identity.

I'm just going to drop an explanation I post around quite a bit here. 

It wasn't written for you, and any snark you find in there is definitely not directed at you  

Spoiler

There are a lot of different aspects to gender.

• Gender roles/norms/expectations are unwritten rules society has for how men and women should behave. (Men can't wear make-up. Crying is for girls. Women shouldn't be too assertive.) These are not part of an individual's identity. They are part of a society's culture.
• Gender expression is what your gender appears to be to other people. (Includes gendered things like clothing, colors, make-up, mannerisms, tone of voice, way of walking, gestures while talking, how intensely emotions are expressed etc)
• Gender identity is a very complicated concept and it is the core of what we are talking about when we’re discussing trans issues. Before you can know what ‘transgender’ is, you need to know what ‘gender identity’ is. 

So there are two main theories on what 'gender identity' is.

 

First you've got the (in my opinion outdated) theory put forward by Judith Butler, Simone de Beauvoir and the like. They resist the idea that any aspect of gender identity can be innate. As de Beauvoir says "One isn't born a woman, one becomes a woman." This basically means that you feel like a woman because it's what you're used to. You behave like a woman because that's what's socially acceptable. In this view people act how they're supposed to act according to the gender roles in their culture. The constant repetition of doing what they're supposed to do gets etched into their brains and becomes their gender identity. For Butler and de Beauvoir, gender identity is the internalization of culturally imposed gender norms and expectations.

 

Then there's a newer theory about gender identity. This one builds on the first one and accepts it as partially correct, but asserts that gender identity is also partially innate. If it wasn't, then it would logically follow that trans people simply can’t exist, because your gender identity would entirely depend on what you were raised to be.

 

Joan Roughgarden, a transgender evolutionary biologist who wrote a whole book on the science of lgbt identities, is a proponent of this one. According to her, ‘gender identity’ is a deep-seated sense of self that's been established from the time you were born. In her book 'Evolution's Rainbow', she writes:

 

I envision gender identity as a cognitive lens. When a baby opens his or her eyes after birth and looks around, whom will the baby emulate and whom will he or she merely notice? Perhaps a male baby will emulate his father or other men, perhaps not, and a female baby her mother or other women, perhaps not. I imagine that a lens in the brain controls who to focus on as a “tutor.” Transgender identity is then the acceptance of a tutor from the opposite sex. Degrees of transgender identity, and of gender variance generally, reflect different degrees of single-mindedness in the selection of the tutor’s gender. The development of gender identity thus depends on both brain state and early postnatal experience, because brain state indicates what the lens is, and environmental experience supplies the image to be photographed through that lens and ultimately developed immutably into brain circuitry. Once gender identity is set, like other basic aspects of temperament, life proceeds from there.

 

So a cisgender female baby instinctively emulates women, a transgender baby with a female body instinctively emulates men, and a non-binary baby instinctively emulates both. Simple. 

 

The innate part of gender identity is the part that decides which of the two genders (or both or neither) you will instinctively emulate during your life. The behavior of that group of people then supplies you with the learned aspect of your gender identity. So the innate part tells you which gender(s) to imitate and the learned part is what kind of behavior you're actually imitating and internalizing.

 

Gender identity as Roughgarden describes it, is a deep-seated, immutable sense of belonging or kinship to a gender (either to the social construct or to the group of people). A sense of "I belong with those people, or the other group, or maybe both or not really with either."

 

You can't change this sense of belonging by raising someone differently. There have been cases where a doctor made a mistake while circumcising a baby boy and accidentally cut of the entire penis. For example, there’s David Reimer. That boy was raised as a girl instead, from birth, but still always felt like a boy. He 'transitioned' back into a man eventually.

 

Gender identity is at least partially innate and biological, not just cultural, so the argument that your gender identity can't be anything but 'man' or 'woman' because that's the only two genders that exist in our culture, is not applicable. Gender identity =/= gender as a social construct. Gender identity is to which degree you instinctively identify with those two culturally established genders.

 

Why is it so hard to imagine that some brains are simply somewhere in between male and female? Why is it so hard to imagine that some people feel a sense of belonging to both genders, and others to neither?

 

My guess is agender people don't feel at home in either group, genderfluid babies could emulate their dad during some activities (like boxing) and their mom in other situations (like socializing), and neutrois people sort of feel stuck in between the two groups, but I don't know. The only way to know is to ask them. Our neurobiology science skills aren't advanced enough to read people's minds yet.

Gender Identity versus Gender Expression

Yes, of course everyone has a feminine and a masculine side, but that's not what we're talking about here. For example, a man can be feminine, he can like wearing make-up and dresses, talk in a stereotypically feminine way, and still identify as a man. Is his feminine side a 'deep-seated sense of identity', 'a cognitive lens that determines which gender(s) a baby will emulate from the minute they're born'? I doubt it. I think it's gender expression, not gender identity. For a nonbinary person, that's different.

 

A nonbinary person is not someone who simply dislikes the gender role they're put into. A guy who likes to break gendered expectations by wearing dresses is a crossdresser, a drag queen or a gender-nonconforming person, not a nonbinary person. Those are terms for people who have non-standard gender expressions. A nonbinary person is a person who has this innate, deep-seated, unchangeable sense of belonging to both genders, or to neither. If their body or the social role people ascribe to them doesn't line up with their inner sense of what they are, this leads to dysphoria. Dysphoria is an integrally important sign of ‘transgenderness’.

 

Gender dysphoria is either a feeling of discomfort/distress with gendered aspects of your body (meaning you'd feel a need to change your body = transition) or a feeling of discomfort/distress because of what gender people perceive you to be (meaning you'd want to take steps in order to be perceived differently = transition).

 

Gender euphoria is the opposite of dysphoria, it's feeling extremely 'right' when you're seen by others as how you perceive yourself. Euphoria can also be the thing to clue people in on their gender identity, sometimes instead of dysphoria.

 

Gender expression includes gendered things like clothing, make-up, mannerisms, tone of voice, way of walking, gestures while talking etc.

The innate part of gender identity doesn't have anything to do with any of those things.

Are NB’s trans?

                                                                Trans people

                                                       ↙                                  ↘

                                    binary trans people                nonbinary trans people

They're all trans.

 

Nonbinary people can transition, so even if you were (in my opinion incorrectly) basing your definition of ‘transgender’ on whether or not transition is possible, you still wouldn’t have a reason to say NB’s aren’t trans. NB’s can transition medically (through hormone treatment and surgery) as well as socially. Social transition isn't easy. It should be taken seriously. http://gender.wikia.com/wiki/Social_Transition

 

An NB transitions for the same reasons a binary trans person transitions, in order to have their body reflect their inner selves more, and in order to be perceived differently. It's true that in this culture NB's won't 'pass' as their true gender, because not enough people know that nonbinary identities exist, so they won't automatically recognize someone as 'Oh, that person doesn't look quite male or female, they're probably nonbinary,' as they would (most of the time) correctly recognize a woman to be a woman and a man to be a man. However, that's a problem with our culture, not with nonbinary people.

 

'Binary trans' and 'nonbinary trans' are two different types of being trans. If individual nonbinary people don’t identify as trans, then there's probably a personal story for why they don't, or maybe they just aren’t aware that nb’s are trans, or maybe they’ve made the common mistake to confuse gender expression with gender identity and they’re actually gender-nonconforming. You won't know until you ask them.

 

NB's not identifying as trans is kind of like black feminists not identifying as feminists. Some black feminists don't identify as feminists because they don't feel represented by white feminism. They feel white feminists aren't committed enough to ending all forms of oppression, instead of just to ending sexism. I believe they call themselves womanists. They're feminists, but refuse to identify as such for personal or political reasons.

 

That's what it's like with nb's too. They're trans, but some refuse to identify as trans for personal or political reasons. These reasons are very diverse. For example, indigenous folks don't conceptualize their genders in the same way western societies do. It's not as medicalized or othered. Personally I could understand why they'd rather identify with the concepts they had before ours came along.

 

I think it answers a lot of questions you posed, and also disagrees with some of what you said, but if anything is unclear, please feel free to ask more questions  

 

On 10/25/2019 at 6:33 AM, AweSim said:

I've always thought I was a female, because that's what my body is, and I liked 'girly things' when I was younger, and I acted 'like a girl', but isn't that technically subjective on people's idea of 'female'?

Maybe look into cis-genderless?

Lots of cis people don't really feel like their gender. They just kind of never have to think about it. If they woke up with a different body tomorrow, they could roll with that too. But for other (cis) people that's different, and they do feel a sense of belonging to their gender.

 

And yeah if you'd been born in a different era or different place, your ideas of what acting 'like a girl' is would've been different, but that doesn't change that deep seated sense of belonging that some people feel with one gender, the other, both or neither.

[R_1]

As a cis-genderless, I can't say that I instinctly follow other males or females if that is even possible, and I sure don't know what it means to act like a male or female, neither makes sense to me. Gender feeling, or gender expression, or role isn't even there from my frame of reference, but I only id as male just because my body indicates that it is, and life is simpler that way. Some would say that I'm agender, but eh whatever.

 

On 10/25/2019 at 1:21 AM, Scottthespy said:

I did see a video once about male and female brains being physically different...a different distribution of white and grey matter, which made for a trend towards more easily understanding certain things, which is where we get the 'men are analytical and aggressive' and 'women are nurturing and meek' stereotypes from.

You could make the case that other than body mapping, there doesn't seem to be anything consistent pertaining to male and female brain and even some studies suggests we are all just a mix between two, and there has been large metaanalysis of 40+ studies that suggests that when variance is taken into account, there isn't any behavioral difference between males and females.

 

On 10/25/2019 at 2:16 AM, Marian the Herbalist said:

We're all different, and that doesn't mean that we're wrong or should have to change our appearance to "match how we feel".

While emphasizing with your point of view, reality is different as there is a lot of people that would like to be addressed in a different way, and would like to change appearance to reduce body dysphoria or to fit in socially better. I don't the big deal about addressing others in a way that they would like to be treated as.

 

[Mysearchbroughtme_here]

I'm new to even having a nominal designation for the way I've felt most of my life. I'm interested in this but I can only answer experientially so please don't shoot me down. In the most part I agree with @AweSim and the view presented in the post. Personally I look like a man, was raised to do 'manly' things and generally followed the herd. When it became obvious that I maybe didn't have a typical view of sex in that I was 'somewhat repulsed' (no matter how hard I tried to be like everyone else I knew) I just started thinking about it. I sort of approached the mental side of things via the impact of societies conventions, expectations and learned behaviour rather than biological difference. I consider myself Heteroromanticasexual in as much as I find the female form more appealing than the male but that's about it. Superficially there are preferences based on biological differences but with regards to the mind? It's something I ponder frequently - it's a puzzler and no mistake! Thanks for raising the discussion. 

 

 

[PoeciMeta]

54 minutes ago, R_1 said:

 

On 10/25/2019 at 7:21 AM, Scottthespy said:

I did see a video once about male and female brains being physically different...a different distribution of white and grey matter, which made for a trend towards more easily understanding certain things, which is where we get the 'men are analytical and aggressive' and 'women are nurturing and meek' stereotypes from.

You could make the case that other than body mapping, there doesn't seem to be anything consistent pertaining to male and female brain and even some studies suggests we are all just a mix between two, and there has been large metaanalysis of 40+ studies that suggests that when variance is taken into account, there isn't any behavioral difference between males and females.

I'm just gonna pop in and drop my dear old brain plasticity in the corner, don't mind me >.>

 

Of course, if it was that simple there wouldn't be trans people, but still, in my uneducated opinion, it can explain a good chunk of genderly things. It's mainly a cultural thing, after all.

But still, even with gender being so foreign to me, logically I shouldn't care much. There is this unexplainable part of me that rejects gender and wants no association with it. So, the existence of genders is useful (albeit mysterious) and, yeah, as much as I dislike it, they're significant to me, just so I can oppose myself to them~

[xToasty]

I was doing some internet research on physical differences between males and females, because I was thinking that there are probably hormones or whatnot that differentiate the genders, and I agree with the stuff y'all were saying about the brain. Apparantly trans women's brains are more like cis women's brains than cis men, and vice versa. There are also different chromosomes (X&Y) in the DNA that determines gender, and transgenderness is also caused by the chromosomes being different to your sex, which can mess up the hormone-y stuff and give you a different gender to your sex. But yeah, I guess there is a physical difference between the bodies that causes some particular traits between males and females, and these can be different to the birth sex due to a different makeup in the brain and hormones and whatnot.    (Damn, I wanna become a scientist so I can research all this stuff, haha)

 

 

HOWEVER! I'm very doubtful that the chromosomes tell you exactly what you should wear and what toys you can play with and how you should act at all times and all that crap. That's a social construct, and really, that stuff isn't what decides your gender. That's all stupid. I'm sure there would be a lot less behavioural trends if there was less push on traits being associated with particular genders. I also agree with how gender should not be obsessed over to make people feel anxious and whatnot. I feel that your gender shouldn't have to be a burden on your mind, and you should just be you. Man, I wish for a world where people can just be chill about each other... *sigh*

 

 

- (Sidenote, I really love reading everyone's opinions and point of view on this matter, it's really cool ^^)

 

[ChickenScratch]

   Same.

   I was lucky to grow up in a society that didn't push gender roles that strongly. Of course being girly, playing with dolls and wearing dresses was encouraged, but playing with toy blasters and wearing boyish clothes was never prohibited.

  Trans folks' feeling are something you gotta feel to understand, I guess. But I really wish that the stories like "people didn't accept the nonconforming person so they had to transition" didn't happen

 

  I'm glad I found this topic and I like the "gender-apathetic" label quite a lot (not that I will 100% use it, but still) ^^

[rotth]

gender is simply a lived identity. theres no solid definition for what it means to be x gender or y gender

 

there is no such thing as a gendered brain

[IrishArcher]

I'm not sure it's possible to define gender at all without defaulting to stereotypes or biology. I asked a few different people about their experiences identifying as a certain gender, and their answers all varied significantly. Some said they identified with the societal norms of their assigned gender and thus identified with that gender. Some said they didn't really care for the societal norms but still didn't mind being treated as their assigned gender. Gender means different things to different people - I don't think it has a universal definition. Personally, I can't say what "womanhood" means aside from the fact that sometimes it applies to me and sometimes it doesn't. I just see it as a group people, like a club, and sometimes I feel like I'm a part of it, while other times it feels completely foreign to me. I couldn't possibly say "all women" do certain things or are a certain way, so I can't define womanhood apart from saying it's separate from manhood and non-binaryhood and every other gender category simply by virtue of the people within it declaring it so. Since a lot of people feel very strongly about their membership within each group, I think it's up to those people to define what that means for them.

[Janus the Fox]

Yeah it’s like there is very broad wide concept that is different between cultures, societies and neuro-psycho-social difference as well as body and mind differences.  It’s confusing for anybody focused into it and when there’s a clear difference between a persons identity and what the consequences culture differs from.

 

Theres a detailed wiki page on it, though it ever feels accurate personally.  It’s like it’s made to be confusing for anyone that not fits their local cultures expectations from r lack of a better world.

 

Placing my own gender even.  Socially it feels nonexistent hence the clearer Agender gender and the body and mind difference hence being trans personally.