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Is the gender a stupid thing?


Silas_

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Gifted With Singleness
On 8/1/2020 at 6:30 AM, BellaBubTheExplorer said:

What made your upbringing so orientated around a persons sex identity over their gender identiy?

Well, I wasn't really raised with rigid gender roles the way that most people are. I can't recall a single moment of my life when I was told, "You can't do that. That's for girls!" I also have a tendency to think about things from a strictly logical point of view, and the only gender expectations I could make sense of were the ones I assumed had something to do with sex. That was pretty much limited to appearance, bathrooms, and pronouns. Appearance signals your sex, bathrooms are separated because of anatomy, and pronouns are a grammatical convention referring to sex. Sure, I was still gender non-conforming to some degree, but none of that ever made me think of myself as transgender. It just made me think that people need to stop believing in stereotypes.

 

On 8/1/2020 at 6:30 AM, BellaBubTheExplorer said:

Also, what was it that made you look into gender identity the first time, and what spurred you on the journey to try and understand it, if you don't mind me asking? I can only imagine how powerful it was to put your views into question. Was it a person, or a thing, or time? You don't have to answer, but I'd totally love to know!

It was a long process. The first time I ever really thought about gender identity in any serious capacity was during my senior year of high school. At the time, President Obama had recently sent a memo encouraging schools to let trans people use the bathroom corresponding to their gender identity. I was in an English class focused on making persuasive arguments, and we had a classroom discussion about this topic. The teacher made the argument that trans people using the bathroom corresponding to their gender identity makes cis people uncomfortable.

 

I was absolutely bewildered as to why he was making this argument, and I ended up being the most vocal person in the room shooting it down. "We can't just base all of our decisions on what makes the majority comfortable! Ever heard of tyranny of the majority?" I wasn't even fully committed to the side of trans rights. I just wanted him to make a better argument. After all, aren't bathrooms separated due to anatomy? Where's all this "discomfort" bullshit coming from? But he wouldn't budge. "Guys, it's a simple numbers argument. If cis people are uncomfortable, that's more people who are uncomfortable." But I wasn't having any of it, and I left that discussion wondering why on earth that was his argument of choice.

 

Over time, I heard more and more people talking about gender identity, and I was still confused as to what people were talking about. I had this idea, deep in my head, that somehow, trans people are claiming to be the opposite sex. I didn't want to think that, and I wanted to be proven wrong, but I still had a hard time with it.

 

Discovering my asexuality was a major turning point. It gave me a better understanding of what gay people go through, and I started thinking about LGBT issues more deeply. But the T in LGBT was still a mystery to me, and I wanted that mystery cleared up.

 

At one point, the church I went to had a sermon series about controversial issues, and one of the sermons was about sexual orientation. I actually met with the pastor beforehand to give my input as an asexual person, and after the sermon, there was a Q&A session where I came across another ace person. They also identified as non-binary, and after the following week's sermon about gender identity (which I found confusing), I ended up talking to this new non-binary ace friend of mine to get a better understanding of things.

 

They assured me that, no, they weren't claiming to be a different sex, and gender is something else. After all, if gender is the same thing as sex, then how do you explain grammatical gender in languages like Spanish, French, and German? How do you explain the way people treat gender in society? When people have gender reveal parties, are they playing a game of, "Guess My Baby's Genitals?" I didn't have answers to those questions, but they did get me thinking.

 

Let's go back to my asexuality for a moment. At one point, I was in the middle of an AVEN thread where we ended up talking about consent. Someone made the point that, if you're only having sex because you feel like it's your "duty", then that is not authentic consent. Suddenly, a light bulb went off. To me, all sex is rape, since I could only ever conceptualize sex as a duty.

 

Then I started philosophizing. What is sex, really? Is it just two people mashing their genitals together, or is there more to it than that? It definitely seems like there's more to it than that. A core "essence of sex" that's impossible to put into words. It reminded me of the philosophical concept of qualia: subjective conscious experiences. For example, how do you explain color to a blind person? You can talk about different wavelengths of light from a scientific perspective. You can categorize things by color by listing things that are red, things that are blue, etc. You can describe the emotional aspects of color like an artist. But does any of that really explain color, in a way that a blind person would understand? Not really. There's a certain sense in which, in order to truly understand what red is, you have to see red. You have to have that conscious experience. That's qualia.

 

So, what is the qualia of sex? I tried to think about me having sex. Not in a clinical sense, but in a way that sexual people think about having sex. I couldn't do it. In fact, I started noticing that my brain would do everything it possibly could to prevent itself from going there. I felt a weird mixture of disgust and agony that I hadn't felt before. And it makes sense as to why. If all sex involving me is rape, then thinking about me having sex means thinking about me getting raped. That's pretty traumatic, so my brain does everything it possibly can to stop that thought from happening. It's a forbidden thought. That's why my brain has to treat sex as an abstract thing that doesn't involve me. That's why I feel disconnected from sex. Sure, that means I'll miss out on this "qualia" of sexual thoughts that most people have, but I suppose it's for the best.

 

Now let's apply this reasoning to gender. If I say, "I am a man", what am I really saying? Am I just saying that I have a Y chromosome and a penis? That doesn't feel like what I'm saying. So what am I saying? I don't know! But it can't mean nothing! It can't be gibberish! So what's going on here? Perhaps this internal sense of gender is like color. It's real, but I can't put it to words. That's the "qualia" of gender.

 

Okay, so let's take that "qualia", and imagine what it would be like to have this indescribable experience, but with a female body...

 

ERROR! ERROR! CODE RED! YOU HAVE ENTERED THE FORBIDDEN THOUGHT ZONE! STEP AWAY IMMEDIATELY!

 

Wait, what just happened? I'm feeling a weird mix of disgust and agony. It's the exact same feeling I had when trying to imagine myself having sex (with all that entails). My brain is doing everything it can to prevent me from having this forbidden thought.

 

Maybe I'll never truly understand what gender dysphoria actually feels like. But at least I know that it's a real thing, and I have some understanding of what it is. Kind of like sexual attraction.

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