a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by coffeesp00ns
coffeesp00ns  ·  2573 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: It's the International Trans Day of Visibility. I'm Trans. Ask Me Almost Anything

    How were your conceptions of gender and sex formed if not by social interaction with others?

One could ask the question another way - How can we form a personal feeling of gender outside of social structure?

One idea is that there is an element of gender that is somehow inherent. A lot of people don't like that, because to them it says that women's and men's brains are "different" and therefore one must be superior - or at least people can start arguing about who is superior. And I get it, it's dangerous - but we already know men's and women's brains are different, and that the brains of trans people are more like the gender they feel they are than their assigned gender.

Makes a crazy kind of sense, and that's what I'm going with since it's backed up by the sources I showed you and that's about as good as I can get without actually studying to be a brain researcher.





dublinben  ·  2572 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    How can we form a personal feeling of gender outside of social structure?

I believe that we can't, since gender is a social construct. Our understanding of gender and what it means to "feel male" or "feel female" does not exist outside of our social context. Most cis people also don't have much of a "personal feeling of gender" since they don't experience dysphoria.

coffeesp00ns  ·  2572 days ago  ·  link  ·  

So I don't entirely disagree with you here - what I'm trying to say is that it's more complicated than that. I just replied to neurotransmissions mentioning this, but there are current and historic cultures that have more than two genders. Hardcore historical traditional Jewish culture has... 6 I think (?), not that they really line up with how we think about gender. India broadly has Three cultures including Hijras, though their official government recognition is very new.

Basically what I'm saying is that humans have been trying to describe and decide where to put trans people for a very long time. This is why I have a problem with the question "would trans people exist without gender as a construct", because it misunderstands the purpose of that same construct. Each of these current and historical gender constructs, including our own current one, are just a tool that we are using to try and figure out how we fit into the world. Trans people are often inconvenient because of how we complicate that tool's functioning.

The construct itself is meaningless because we created it to try and describe what we see - It is dependent on us, we are not dependent on it. So, Trans people do exist without the construct of gender, that's why different cultures throughout history have had so many different gender constructs: They're trying to describe everyone, including us.