i haven't found an answer that's neither weak nor throws... | Mx Amber Alex

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i haven't found an answer that's neither weak nor throws parts of the community under the bus, so if you have a good answer please share it with me

Like 25 Jun 2022 at 22:05 | Open on eldritch.cafe

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Okay, here's the more elaborate thoughts I talked about.

(repost because I found a typo, ugh)

‘If gender isn't real, why do you want to be the other gender so badly?’

Who said gender isn't real?

Gender is a social construct. Meaning, it's man-made. Other social constructs include money (the dollar is a human invention), units of measurement (humans defined meter and degrees), directions (we divided the Earth's magnetic field into four directions), and so on. They are arbitrary definitions, usually (but not always) to describe natural phenomena. But while most social constructs match the natural phenomena they describe—degrees can be measured and there is nothing ambiguous about them, a meter will always be the same length—the same cannot be said for gender.

Although we often think of so-called ‘biological sex’ as an unambiguous binary, there are in fact countless factors that come into play, many of them mutable, and only one or two—external genitalia and chromosome configuration—are commonly used to assign gender at birth. Therefore, although gender claims to be the same as biological sex, an immutable binary, it is anything but. If gender were a perfect representation of the biological reality it claims to represent, there wouldn't be two genders but dozens, one for each possible combination.

What gender is, then, is an imperfect social construct. Yet it is ingrained deeply in our society, which uses it for every possible purpose, no matter how pointless. ‘Sex’ is often invoked to separate medical procedures, sports, changing rooms, toilets, even though in practice, it is not chromosomes, genitalia, reproductive organs, and hormon levels that are examined for such separations—they are based on looks. The assumed gender, mislabelled as the biological spectrum it claims to represent.

In other words: society enforces gender. Which makes it quite real, and has tangible implications for everyone. Even if gender weren't real (again: social construct means man-made, not non-existing), it becomes real as society enforces it. (Note: we are not talking about gender roles or expression here! Only gender as a shorthand for an assumption of biological sex.) And since it would be impossibly currently to separate societal norms from this absurdly heavy focus on gender/sex, the next best thing is to work within the existing system.

What does that mean? It means to accept gender for what it is: an artificial construct. At which point, without dismantling a system so deeply underpinning our society, we can begin to work with that construct, expanding it to include non-binary genders, modifying it to allow changing one's gender, and removing the supposedly inseparable connection with biological details, which gender never correctly mapped to begin with, for those of us whose gender simply does not match our genitalia, our DNA, our reproductive organs, our hormone levels, etc. (most of which, by the way, can be medically changed).

Society is, at present, inseparably connected with gender, and has been for millennia. Asking trans people, and only trans people, to pretend like gender doesn't exist, while living in a society that (oftentimes violently) enforces it, is simply not fair. It is cynical. To return to another social construct, money, it's like asking ‘if rent shouldn't exist, why do you want rent control’, and telling tenants to live like there's no money in the world, while their landlord is trying to evict them.

As long as we live in a heavily gendered world, truly living without gender is impossible. You cannot fault trans people for trying to find their own place in the existing categories, when they neither made them nor have the power to dismantle them. If you can imagine a world without gender, good for you—but that's not the one we live in right now.

26 Jun 2022 at 8:00 | Open on eldritch.cafe