Fair enough. But on that basis, it might be useful to have a word to describe the thing that’s defined by body parts and chromosomes and which, to a first approximation, and not denying the existence of intersex people, is mostly just male and female.. I guess “sex” might do.
What? Is this some kind of bumpersticker or trucker hat? More in the ridiculous history of making false comparisons and mottos to reduce something complicated to something simple but incorrect.
Right column, # 1, 2, 4 are sex and 3 is orientation.
Left column… how I relate to myself? The relationship of myself to myself is the identity relationship, a=a.
Gender != Samantha. Gender and Samantha may, or may not intersect. Gender would be the set of all characteristics of a gender, I think, whereas Samantha would be the set of all characteristics of me. Mathematician is a characteristic of me that should not intersect with the set of gender, although may would put it into the masculine gender category, so not hte best example. Lefthanded! I am left handed, so that would be in the set of Samantha, but lefthandedness has nothing to do with gender (in the west) so it is not in any gender set.
Hence, there is at least one member of the set of Samantha not in the stt masculine gender or feminine gender. Therefore, Samantha cannot equal ender so my relationship to myself is not gender.
Yes, I don’t suppose they meant for it to make sense mathematically, but since I could prove it doesn’t work there, it seems to me that they need to define better what they mean and how it works.
Not sure it’s relevant here, but in my first language (Dutch) the ‘sexual’ part of ‘sexual intercourse’ is the same as the word for gender, i.e. “gender” = “geslacht” and “fucking” = “geslachtsgemeenschap”*/** I think this is unfortunate and English is better off for having a bigger separation between naughty bits and identities.
* Which in my opinion is the frontrunner for least-sexy-word-in-the-Dutch-language.
** Incidentally the word “geslacht” also means “butchered”.
I used to be quite comfortable with the old sex=body, gender=social role as related to sex. I think it could still work fine, as long as you realise that bodies aren’t exactly binary and in-betweens of various kinds exist.
But now I have no clue what gender is even supposed to mean.
It doesn’t mean what that stupid graphic says it means. It doesn’t mean anything and everything. It’s not personality or hobbies or likes & dislikes or tastes or habits or “identity” or any of that.
Yeah, if that graphic is supposed to clarify gender it does an extraordinarily bad job. After reading that I have no idea what the word ‘gender’ even means to the author. It reminds me of new age definitions of ‘soul’.
‘It’s not personality or hobbies or likes & dislikes or tastes or habits or “identity” or any of that.’
I guess the problem is that plenty of people, perhaps the majority, still believe that ‘personality or hobbies or likes & dislikes or tastes or habits’ can be determined or predicted, or are constrained, by gender.
That makes sense of being trans gender, too. A child sees the social roles played by boys and girls, compares them with regards to how their own brain works (though not in those words, of course), and decides which gender fits them accordingly. It is later – sometimes much, much later – that they find out that gender roles are actually imposed by society based on their sex organs, not on how their brains work; and in trans gender kids that is probably when the dysphoria begins, I think.
Certainly in my own case I couldn’t understand why my parents decided I was a girl, and my sister was a girl, whereas my brother was a boy; it seemed so arbitrary. I just played the way I wanted to, which was pretty much the way my brother did and, mostly, so did my sister (they were two and five years younger than me) except that they (unlike me, but like my cousins) loved to play with dolls, too. By the time my youngest sister came along when I was twelve I had learned to suppress the part of me that was ‘me’, and act according to the gender ‘rules’ for my sex. I even started to play with ‘dolls’ (actually action figures, but it was a compromise). That was the start of decades of suppression and the inability to understand the premise behind the words (meant to be encouraging) “Just be yourself!”
That graphic turns a comparatively simple concept into a ridiculously obscure one.
Hold the phone. The whole point of being “trans” is that your biologically apparent gender is NOT the same as your deeply held belief of what it is — contrary to the evidence in your chromosomes or your phenotype.
I was 1 year and 2 months old when I watched my mother help my aunt bathe my newborn cousin. Apparently I immediately observed he had some body parts that differed from mine and announced my discovery loudly. But I doubt I drew any broader conclusions about that difference. By the time my brother was born I was 3 and definitely knew that these differences meant whether one was classified ‘girl’ or ‘boy’. I found it odd that my playmate, who was a year older than me, was not aware, and expected me to be able to pee standing up (but then he did not have any sisters).
Anyway, while I knew about differences in acceptable hairstyles and clothes, differences in activities were less clear or consistent. But I think it took until 1st grade to run into gender-policing by peers (‘don’t use the green chips in math class, that’s a boy color’) and sexist attitudes by peers (boys refusing to do classroom activities with girls, boys calling girls names, boys banding together to make girls lose; much of the hostility was diminished when a particular boy went on an extended vacation). 1st grade was also when I asked to wear a 2-part bathing suit because I wanted to be gendered correctly while attending swimming class and sporting a short haircut. That should mark me as ‘cis’.
To compare and contrast myself and my child: We were both assigned female at birth. Both of us had times in our respective childhoods when random strangers who looked at us either had a difficulty deciding our respective genders or were convinced we were boys.
My reaction to being thought of as a boy or to finding people confused about whether I was a girl or a boy was to insist clearly that I was a girl (except the one time the principal yelled at the presumed boy to get off the tree – I decided to ignore him, he obviously must have been yelling at someone else). Depending on the circumstances, I sometimes thought the person was being not-so-bright, assuming my looks or behavior were somehow inconsistent with me being a girl.
OTOH my child describes that such situations caused them to feel ‘inexplicably happy’.
This difference in reaction corresponds with me being cis and my child being trans.
And my reaction when people think I’m a guy is to want to laugh at them for being so easily fooled, but if they note I seem kind of masculine, I consider them observant. Because behaviors are gendered but I behave how I want to, not how I’m supposed to. On the other hand, sex has physical reality. Mascara on my chin and armor on my body should be transparent to someone who actually knows me, rather than an impenetrable disguise.
Fair enough. But on that basis, it might be useful to have a word to describe the thing that’s defined by body parts and chromosomes and which, to a first approximation, and not denying the existence of intersex people, is mostly just male and female.. I guess “sex” might do.
I think it’s a mess. It treats gender as a cool neat fun thing and something to celebrate.
What? Is this some kind of bumpersticker or trucker hat? More in the ridiculous history of making false comparisons and mottos to reduce something complicated to something simple but incorrect.
Gender is…
– not a word in my first language
– apparently not anything we need a separate word for, either
Right column, # 1, 2, 4 are sex and 3 is orientation.
Left column… how I relate to myself? The relationship of myself to myself is the identity relationship, a=a.
Gender != Samantha. Gender and Samantha may, or may not intersect. Gender would be the set of all characteristics of a gender, I think, whereas Samantha would be the set of all characteristics of me. Mathematician is a characteristic of me that should not intersect with the set of gender, although may would put it into the masculine gender category, so not hte best example. Lefthanded! I am left handed, so that would be in the set of Samantha, but lefthandedness has nothing to do with gender (in the west) so it is not in any gender set.
Hence, there is at least one member of the set of Samantha not in the stt masculine gender or feminine gender. Therefore, Samantha cannot equal ender so my relationship to myself is not gender.
Yes, I don’t suppose they meant for it to make sense mathematically, but since I could prove it doesn’t work there, it seems to me that they need to define better what they mean and how it works.
Not sure it’s relevant here, but in my first language (Dutch) the ‘sexual’ part of ‘sexual intercourse’ is the same as the word for gender, i.e. “gender” = “geslacht” and “fucking” = “geslachtsgemeenschap”*/** I think this is unfortunate and English is better off for having a bigger separation between naughty bits and identities.
* Which in my opinion is the frontrunner for least-sexy-word-in-the-Dutch-language.
** Incidentally the word “geslacht” also means “butchered”.
I used to be quite comfortable with the old sex=body, gender=social role as related to sex. I think it could still work fine, as long as you realise that bodies aren’t exactly binary and in-betweens of various kinds exist.
But now I have no clue what gender is even supposed to mean.
It doesn’t mean what that stupid graphic says it means. It doesn’t mean anything and everything. It’s not personality or hobbies or likes & dislikes or tastes or habits or “identity” or any of that.
That’s not how any of this works!
Yeah, if that graphic is supposed to clarify gender it does an extraordinarily bad job. After reading that I have no idea what the word ‘gender’ even means to the author. It reminds me of new age definitions of ‘soul’.
Get too generalistic with the definition of a word and it ceases to mean anything at all… that graphic is not useful.
‘It’s not personality or hobbies or likes & dislikes or tastes or habits or “identity” or any of that.’
I guess the problem is that plenty of people, perhaps the majority, still believe that ‘personality or hobbies or likes & dislikes or tastes or habits’ can be determined or predicted, or are constrained, by gender.
I’m with Alethea:
That makes sense of being trans gender, too. A child sees the social roles played by boys and girls, compares them with regards to how their own brain works (though not in those words, of course), and decides which gender fits them accordingly. It is later – sometimes much, much later – that they find out that gender roles are actually imposed by society based on their sex organs, not on how their brains work; and in trans gender kids that is probably when the dysphoria begins, I think.
Certainly in my own case I couldn’t understand why my parents decided I was a girl, and my sister was a girl, whereas my brother was a boy; it seemed so arbitrary. I just played the way I wanted to, which was pretty much the way my brother did and, mostly, so did my sister (they were two and five years younger than me) except that they (unlike me, but like my cousins) loved to play with dolls, too. By the time my youngest sister came along when I was twelve I had learned to suppress the part of me that was ‘me’, and act according to the gender ‘rules’ for my sex. I even started to play with ‘dolls’ (actually action figures, but it was a compromise). That was the start of decades of suppression and the inability to understand the premise behind the words (meant to be encouraging) “Just be yourself!”
That graphic turns a comparatively simple concept into a ridiculously obscure one.
Hold the phone. The whole point of being “trans” is that your biologically apparent gender is NOT the same as your deeply held belief of what it is — contrary to the evidence in your chromosomes or your phenotype.
That meme doesn’t make sense at all.
I was 1 year and 2 months old when I watched my mother help my aunt bathe my newborn cousin. Apparently I immediately observed he had some body parts that differed from mine and announced my discovery loudly. But I doubt I drew any broader conclusions about that difference. By the time my brother was born I was 3 and definitely knew that these differences meant whether one was classified ‘girl’ or ‘boy’. I found it odd that my playmate, who was a year older than me, was not aware, and expected me to be able to pee standing up (but then he did not have any sisters).
Anyway, while I knew about differences in acceptable hairstyles and clothes, differences in activities were less clear or consistent. But I think it took until 1st grade to run into gender-policing by peers (‘don’t use the green chips in math class, that’s a boy color’) and sexist attitudes by peers (boys refusing to do classroom activities with girls, boys calling girls names, boys banding together to make girls lose; much of the hostility was diminished when a particular boy went on an extended vacation). 1st grade was also when I asked to wear a 2-part bathing suit because I wanted to be gendered correctly while attending swimming class and sporting a short haircut. That should mark me as ‘cis’.
To compare and contrast myself and my child: We were both assigned female at birth. Both of us had times in our respective childhoods when random strangers who looked at us either had a difficulty deciding our respective genders or were convinced we were boys.
My reaction to being thought of as a boy or to finding people confused about whether I was a girl or a boy was to insist clearly that I was a girl (except the one time the principal yelled at the presumed boy to get off the tree – I decided to ignore him, he obviously must have been yelling at someone else). Depending on the circumstances, I sometimes thought the person was being not-so-bright, assuming my looks or behavior were somehow inconsistent with me being a girl.
OTOH my child describes that such situations caused them to feel ‘inexplicably happy’.
This difference in reaction corresponds with me being cis and my child being trans.
And my reaction when people think I’m a guy is to want to laugh at them for being so easily fooled, but if they note I seem kind of masculine, I consider them observant. Because behaviors are gendered but I behave how I want to, not how I’m supposed to. On the other hand, sex has physical reality. Mascara on my chin and armor on my body should be transparent to someone who actually knows me, rather than an impenetrable disguise.