My gender is so difficult to comprehend for cis people that I just call myself a women so I dont confuse them
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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Cis people are missing out!! The more complicated the gender the more awesome you are!!
Im a demigirl, the other part fluxuates between agender/pangender while simultaneously is genderfluid (transfem + demigirl + genderfluid + genderflux) :3
I'm just mystified how you know yourself that well, sitting here in my puddle of self doubt
Trust me, as much as I know theres a lot I still dont. I have no idea why the other half fluxuates and I cant explain or comprehend what it fluxuates between. Sometimes its standard masculine and feminine but sometimes I just want to not have a physical form and just be a concept.
After some googling two things happened:
-
I kind of understand your gender(s)? Maybe?
-
I learned some concepts about gender that I was very unaware of.
A great way to understand it is im part girl part everything else
This is a good place for that reminder that the big lexicon of sexualities, romantic orientations and gender identities are something to help you figure out what your business is. Other people will sometimes have identities that do not appear to match their behavior, and that is fine.
This was the whole point of Russell T. Davies television series Bob & Rose (Bob is gay man who falls in love with Rose, a straight woman, and everybody freaks the fuck out. )
Or to put it another way, if a friend of yours is a lesbian but sometimes likes the d, or has a d or is enby, id est, not a woman, they are still a lesbian.
Most of the lesbian community is down with this, in my experience, but the lesbian community -- and the LGBT+ community in general -- has a long history of gatekeeping, especially of shutting out bi folk and trans folk. And we need peers, friends and allies on the same page. So here we are with the bus driver tapping the sign.
If a straight man sometimes like the d, are they still a straight? Obligatory Asking for a friend.
Regardless of the answer, I'm not going to police someone on their identity.
If a guy likes the d but identifies as straight, then yes, he's straight.
If a guy likes the d (and less so the v) but also musicals and brunching and still identifies as straight, then he's straight.
At very least, the closet continues to be a necessity for some folk in intolerant circumstances.
Identity is something one works out for themselves. Heck the Kinsey scale implies almost everyone should be bi, (even if not very bi) and yet our booleanist society seems to want to categorize only Kinsey-0 as straight (with everyone else as Oh-So-Gay).
Okay but you don't get to tell others what they need to think and feel about your experience.
Somebody has a gender you don't understand. Tough
Also
Somebody doesn't understand your gender. Tough.
While I agree with your sentiment, there is a difference between not understanding and actively disparaging. The former is fine - there's plenty of stuff I don't understand, and I just don't comment on it because I have no business doing so. Where I take objection is when the lack of understanding transforms into bigotry and disparaging remarks.
By all means be ignorant (and I don't mean that in a derogatory manner - we are all ignorant about various things), but don't let your ignorance manifest into negativity.
Agreed.
Don't understand. Fine.
Assumptions, deliberate misunderstandings and misrepresentations. Not fine.
Nothing a discussion can't clarify.
Nah, forget about trying to reason with them. They'll just respond with "I honestly don't care, I just don't like it being shoved down my throat all the time!", even though it isn't actually being 'shoved down their throat', but you can't reason them out of a subjective delusion like that.
No, no, the bigots hate people who speak French too
This is a week analogy.. french only works as a means of communication because it has internal rules that are objective (as in different people understand the same/very similar thing when hearing/seeing a symbol/word).
Singularity of experience is cool, but anything social requires communication/synchronization.
Even though gender is used as a box or definition people are forced to fit into (and this is bad), reducing human experience to a blackbox kind of singularity is a highly individualist take.
You can work on understanding each other without forcing anyone to fit into your definition..
language is objective
no
People don't agree what sentences and words mean all the time. Every single linguist on earth disagrees with you
"/similar"
Language isn't objective though. It wasn't handed down from some deity.
Language is a constantly evolving negotiation of new and remixed communications, performed through billions of interactions every single day. It's collaborative and unpredictable and sometimes someone comes up with something cool and the next day everybody is copying them.
In short, language is socially constructed.
I think it's a great analogy for gender in that respect.
People don't know what words mean in English either yet continue trying to force their made up definitions on others.
Language is objective, because a language is an immaterial object. The opposite, subjective, would impy that language itself has an experience of the world as an entity in itself; that it is a subject.
People's understanding of the languages they speak is subjective (the subject is the person), but their use of language is objective, because they create objects (words, sentences) in the air or on a screen. When another person, a subject, reads those objective words, they then have a new subjective understanding of them. But the words, and the language, remain objects.
Subjective in this sense would mean everyone has their own singular way as opposed to "its the same/similar indepently of the person looking at it".
Words are objects in a sense, although they are abstract, but there is no singular objective language in the same way that there is no objective gender. Both are intersubjective, they are interactions negotiated between subjects. There is no fixed object that you can point to and call "language" independent of a subjective experience of that language.
And your argument could be applied to expressions of gender. A feminine dress is an object, and a beard is an object. These are gender signifiers, but that doesn't make gender itself objective in any way. The analogy to language is very close. They are both sets of signifiers.
Objective and socially constructed isn't a 'hard' contradiction.
Yes of course language evolves and so on, but in a given time(period) it needs to be interpretable more or less independently from the specific actor (a dictionary ensures this, even though it needs to be updated regularly).
In other words yeah sometimes language comes up with new stuff. If it would do it all the time, it wouldn't function
It does change all the time, and dictionaries don't ensure any kind of standard. The linguists who write dictionaries will tell you that their only function is to describe the most popular parts of the language, not to prescribe any particular rules. Telling people how they should speak doesn't actually work.
I could say the phrase "abso-fucking-lutely" and you understand it, even though it's not in the dictionary. That's still language, it's still English.
And I don't know what you mean by a "'hard' contradiction" or why that matters. My point is that both language and gender are forms of communication that rely on socially constructed signifiers and they are both fluid to a similar degree, so the analogy is good. If you want to argue with me, that's the point you should be dealing with.
Well my point is just it's neither fully determined as in ahistoric rule nor random as in "changes all the time" or "everyone has their own singular definitions and concepts". And in between there is the sweet spot of understanding, interpretation and development..
Right, but nobody except grammar nazis and the sith deal in absolutes like that.
Obviously the signifiers have a level of stability otherwise nobody would understand any of it.
This is yet another way in which language and gender are analogous.
The analogy probably gets used for longer than just one week
Thanks I am going to harass French people now
It's hard they don't care what you or anyone else thinks
Respecte mon genre !