@RolloTreadway @GTMLosAngeles @autistic.me @actuallyautistic
I'm very confused at the idea of feeling gender.
I only understood gender as being gaslit that I can't/shouldn't be who I am. I keep SHE to recognise my history of female suppression. I wear dresses to avoid trouser seams. I FEAR macho culture but fem norms = daft. My body doesn't feel wrong or right just weird.
Does any of this touch on what's meant by feeling gender? To me it's mystifying - like talk of experiencing God.
@FrightenedRat @RolloTreadway @GTMLosAngeles @autistic.me @actuallyautistic ime, you know it when you are denied it or it is coerced upon you.
When I came out as gay, that's when I was confronted by it. It wasn't really an issue for me before then (masking and gender, sure, but it didnt make me question anything).
You feel it when someone tries to tell you who you are or are not. A voice or feeling inside that replies, NO!
@FrightenedRat @RolloTreadway @GTMLosAngeles @autistic.me @actuallyautistic for me, being told that being attracted to women is a masc thing.
It's ridiculous now. But at the time I did believe it. And I believed that lesbians were *all* butch, and a whole bunch of other shit too.
For me, it's the voice saying "fuck you, liking women is now officially a woman thing".
@marytzu @RolloTreadway @GTMLosAngeles @autistic.me @actuallyautistic
I get reacting against being forced into a role that doesn't fit - like a male or female stereotype. Two responses:
1) society's gender expectations/categories are wrong.
2) I have a real internal gender different from what soc assigns.
I don't have a sense of internal non-imposed gender so went for 1). But I'm curious about what prompts 2) & if it's a +ive feel not a negation, & if most cis people have the same.
@FrightenedRat @RolloTreadway @GTMLosAngeles @autistic.me @actuallyautistic I suspect that if you have no strong feelings about it, you are cis.
Only oneself can define oneself, though.
Cis isn't a bad word. It's just an adjective that may or may not describe you.
@marytzu @RolloTreadway @GTMLosAngeles @autistic.me @actuallyautistic
But mightn't strong gender feelings tie to the 2 types of understanding above?
On the gender=normative language view, if someone (S)hes me & I don't notice behavioural assumptions, it doesn't impact my identity: I don't react. But to the extent that I notice their (S)he-ing invoking norms I'm 😡.
But on the gender-words-truly-map-to-internal-genders-with-matching-properties view, then all (mis)gendering invades id?
@marytzu @RolloTreadway @GTMLosAngeles @autistic.me @actuallyautistic
Gosh - looking at what I wrote 🔝 it seems I think gender language is muddled normative mess.
Most accept the historical norms as functional.
Some dismantle the concepts or try to reform them in a progressive logical way.
Some ... eh .. take the words literally?? As in begin from the view that the messy words do mean what they say ie map to something real. And, from that start, work to fix the mismatch with irl.
??
@marytzu @RolloTreadway @GTMLosAngeles @autistic.me @actuallyautistic
I'm aware that I'm thinking aloud about stuff which I truly don't understand, and which is really vitally important to others. And that's usually a bad look.
I really don't want to upset or offend anyone - my goal is always understanding, and the less I understand the more desperately I feel the need to make sense.
Apologies for my blundering. If anyone has the time energy & will to school me I'd be grateful.
@FrightenedRat @marytzu @RolloTreadway @autistic.me @actuallyautistic
I am only seeing part of the conversation (I don't get toots from mastodon.social), but what I see you posting does not appear to be blundering at all to me. The thought process that you trace out is very common, I think, at least among folks of my era and culture.
One of the things I learned only in the past decade is how NOT historical the current gender norms are. The norms are strong, but not due to the weight of history, and the purpose those norms serve may be (i think is) nefarious and oppressive.
All of which feels true and relevant and worth addressing in our lives and politics and parenting ... and, as it happens, has very little to do with my gender identity.
What I had been carrying with me until last week was the collection of accommodations, adjustments, and apprehension that allowed me to pass as a cisgender male - not perfectly well, but no one ever achieves perfection in gender. It is not that I took the words literally, but the words literally took me and formed me to be a certain way.
And I had no idea. I never attributed any of the various discomforts (way too mild a word for what I have felt) as related to gender identity. Not even when I faced gender identity crises with my children. I understood, falsely, my decades of gender performance as my identity.
Only by imagining a conversation with my self as a child did that understanding crack. The key phrase that kept bouncing around my head last week was "You don't have to be a girl to like those things ... and you don't have to be a boy either." All I needed was that space, that choice between not just two options but among all of the wide open space near and far away from those two options.
The absolute certainty I have now about what that child I imagine would have felt makes my half-hearted conformity to cisgender male seem such a sham - a sham to myself. I dishonor myself by validating that wrong framework around my identity.
Right now, I am not doing anything with that information other than talking about it rather anonymously. I am not using that information to change the way I behave in public or professional settings - well, maybe a tiny bit, but no pronoun changes or letters to family or such. In other words, if I am in any way dismantling the patriarchy with my new comprehension, then I am doing it only inside my head.
@FrightenedRat @marytzu @RolloTreadway @autistic.me @actuallyautistic
"Do you want to try one of the dresses?"
"Well, no, I'm not a girl!"
"Ok. You don't have to be a girl to like these clothes, you know."
"Yeah, I guess not." Still sighing, still looking down.
"Just between you and me, kid, you don't have to be a boy, either."
The child looked up, eyes glinting. "Really?!"
@GTMLosAngeles @marytzu @RolloTreadway @autistic.me @actuallyautistic
If not a girl+not a boy had been a choice I'd have taken it too.
For the performative gender stuff it's no different in my mind than all the other masking to get by.
I feel sort of blank, so either all those daily micro choices are a sham of an authentic ID, or I accept that an ID just is that web of pragmatic choosing *as shaped by pressures*.
Maybe my failure to grasp gender ID stems from general ID scepticism.
@FrightenedRat @GTMLosAngeles @marytzu @RolloTreadway @autistic.me @actuallyautistic I like that phrase "ID scepticism" 🙂 For me... I'm having to constantly adapt to a rapidly changing external environment.
The core of me (my personal values) is very solid, has no gender & wants not to be constrained by imposing ANY "labels" 🤷♀️
@FrightenedRat @marytzu @RolloTreadway @GTMLosAngeles @autistic.me @actuallyautistic definitely not blundering 💝 you are questioning >>your<< understanding of the concepts & implications for >>yourself<< which that's in no way blundering at all 💖
It's different than denying or negating or pontificating about how <<other>> people should or should not "understand" something that I view as "blundering" ... sometimes that happens accidentally because of lack of awareness but sometimes it is someone's futile attempt to try & get <<other>> people to think or behave a way >>they<< feel more "comfortable" with 🤷♀️
@FrightenedRat @marytzu @RolloTreadway @GTMLosAngeles @autistic.me @actuallyautistic actually when I think about what I said... I recognize that it is a two edged sword... which probably reflects that I >>personally<< think there aren't as many absolutes as most people would like...
Also... I'm thinking that the attempts to constrain, direct or "control" others is really a stronger issue/conflict when disparate individuals feel "threatened" by others behavior 🤔 which is why when you have a community that likes >>you<< you're able to BE more you... but affiliation means you might find yourself doing stuff that doesn't exactly match your >>personal<< core values...
Like why would someone, who you knew as a kid as a really kind person, hook up with a bunch of people & then be seriously UNkind... what the @%/&< happened to that kindness!! Aaaarrggghhh! 😆
@Susan60 @juliasnz @FrightenedRat @RolloTreadway @GTMLosAngeles @autistic.me @actuallyautistic thanks everyone for sharing, it is interesting hearing your lived experience on the matter. info/emodump incoming, brave yourselves!
So I will share my framework for gender. We may not agree. That's fine. Disregard it if you wish. It's just some food for thought.
I think sex and gender in general are bimodal distributions (two peaks with a small offset and a large overlap). 1/
@Susan60 @juliasnz @FrightenedRat @RolloTreadway @GTMLosAngeles @autistic.me @actuallyautistic gender is a complicated abstraction of behaviours and probably other things too.
I think that while allistics have a bunch of subconscious social protocols that we do not have by default (hence the need to mask), there is another layer beneath that for gender.
There is an intersection there for gendered masking. But even without masking there is still gender. 2/
@Susan60 @juliasnz @FrightenedRat @RolloTreadway @GTMLosAngeles @autistic.me @actuallyautistic I think for the far majority of us, it is completely subconscious.
So just like talking to allistics about masking is pretty frustrating coz they just don't get it coz it's subconscious. It's similar for gender.
It's so hard to pin down because it's running in the background. It's only when gender.exe is in conflict with something else it forces a reboot 3/
@Susan60 @juliasnz @FrightenedRat @RolloTreadway @GTMLosAngeles @autistic.me @actuallyautistic I do suspect that just like autists generally do not have the social masking bloatware installed, some people naturally don't have gender sub-layers going on. What that looks like i don't know. But I think we can guess.
4/
@Susan60 @juliasnz @FrightenedRat @RolloTreadway @GTMLosAngeles @autistic.me @actuallyautistic controversial bit incoming, please don't hate me. I think this is why gender abolition is largely pointless.
Like if sufficient *women suddenly used as they/them pronouns. All it would do is flip the nomenclature. They/them would be the new mode of the distribution. It would effectively be a substitution, x=z. With no meaningful change. She/her would become the other 6/
@Susan60 @juliasnz @FrightenedRat @RolloTreadway @GTMLosAngeles @autistic.me @actuallyautistic and yeah please don't get me wrong. Everyone has the fundamental human right to identify however they wish. And I do not wish to impede on that.
I'm just making some macroscale observations here 7/
@Susan60 @juliasnz @FrightenedRat @RolloTreadway @GTMLosAngeles @autistic.me @actuallyautistic I don't think we can abolish gender.
If we try to, then all it is is a superficial change of wording.
I think a more productive endeavour is to reclaim and detoxify the genders and to eliminate coercion from it. 8/
@Susan60 @juliasnz @FrightenedRat @RolloTreadway @GTMLosAngeles @autistic.me @actuallyautistic as far as autism goes, i would really like to see an autistic flavour of womanhood, where we can peel back our masks to something more manageable.
No more allistic dominance, just us being ourselves and seeing where that leads us.
@marytzu
"No more allistic dominance, just us being ourselves and seeing where that leads us."
I been seeing where this leads me for years now. I feel more comfortable, I feel happier overall.
But, I am facing food insecurities, and denied access to money controlled by someone who has been doing the paperwork and phone calls for me.
She rejects my nature, abandons me, neglects me, if I dont submit to her allistic dominance order to "not rant" I'd starve.
I hate my choices. Submit or die.
@marytzu
> I think a more productive endeavour is to reclaim and detoxify the genders and to eliminate coercion from it
Eliminate coercion. Period. To the degree we can achieve that, most of the problems related to gender etc dry up and blow away.
@Susan60 @juliasnz @FrightenedRat @RolloTreadway @GTMLosAngeles @autistic.me @actuallyautistic
@marytzu @Susan60 @FrightenedRat @RolloTreadway @GTMLosAngeles @autistic.me @actuallyautistic that's an excellent discussion of your thinking! Thanks for sharing 💝 I actually come at the gender thing from a, I guess it's different but to me it >>seems<< logical because... it is what I regularly observe so it's based on my "experience" ...
No idea if I'm going to be coherent because... pretty tired but I'll mumble & wave my arms figuratively & probably am so tired I won't notice when everyone goes... "huh? 😐".... 🤣💖
@marytzu @Susan60 @FrightenedRat @RolloTreadway @GTMLosAngeles @autistic.me @actuallyautistic okay... so, I work with animals particularly very special sheep... wild, not domesticated
Sheep are particularly interesting from a behavioral perspective because... about 10% of rams (male sheep) have a stable (it doesn't vary over time, like THEY know who they like) & very strong preference for... other rams & are completely uninterested in ewes (female sheep) which demonstrates clearly to me they are behaving >>naturally<< for THEMSELVES.
No one has told them they have to prefer something else & that they are "wrong" for having their own preference.
Add to that there's actually over 1500 different species of animals that have been directly observed engaging in same sex courtship, bonding, sharing parental duties.... like full on... I CHOOSE >>you<< & you are my mate behavior which is entirely based on their individual CHOICE & a mutual agreement between them that it's awesome & their thing... none of this omg you can't do that because...blah, blah, blah 🤣
A lot of these species have been around considerably longer than humans &... they are doing just fine... individuals' "choices" aren't leading them towards any kind of "apocalypse" 🙄 it appears they really just go with their own instincts for who they like & trust & want to hang out with...
So yeah, humans can fuss about "gender" labels & "preferences" but... they might be important for an individual to help them define themselves but the labels are just... labels 🤔💝
@marytzu @Susan60 @FrightenedRat @RolloTreadway @GTMLosAngeles @autistic.me @actuallyautistic I'm definitely not saying the "labels" aren't important for an individual to define >>themselves<< if that's what they want to do... understanding yourself better is a fantastic idea 🙂💝
For me... I'm still going to adore the person >>I<< chose because they made me smile 🤷♀️ & I'm going to miss them when they've passed... our menagerie is going to miss them too 😕😪
And I hope that everyone finds someone who makes them smile & feel loved & "gender" has NOTHING to do with that... the animals taught me that 💖
@juliasnz @marytzu @Susan60 @FrightenedRat @RolloTreadway @autistic.me @actuallyautistic
Let’s please not equate sexual orientation or romantic attraction with gender identity.
While there is ample evidence of same sex behavior among many species of animals, as yet there is almost no evidence to suggest gender identity exists in other species (excepting only very recent research with bonobos, I believe).
Love is complex and individual and multifaceted … and also has very little to do with gender identity for many.
@Susan60 @juliasnz @FrightenedRat @RolloTreadway @GTMLosAngeles @autistic.me @actuallyautistic when I say "women", I mean all women; cis and trans.
I feel like biological women is a contentious label. Also I hate afab ftr Like okay a doctor x many years ago put a big fat F on my birth certificate, big deal. Doesn't mean shit about who i am. It's just more shifting of goal posts albeit in a gender essentialist direction.
@marytzu @juliasnz @FrightenedRat @RolloTreadway @GTMLosAngeles @autistic.me @actuallyautistic
I don’t think it was ever used at work. Kids called me Miss & colleagues referred to me as Mrs in front of students or parents.
@Susan60 @marytzu @juliasnz @FrightenedRat @RolloTreadway @autistic.me @actuallyautistic
Please consider what that sounds like to hope that no one will care about gender. That’s akin to hoping no one cares about who you are, about some of your most personal interests and values. Of course there will be variation, but care about the variation that individuals identify. It matters.
To hope that no one be devalued or diminished, ignored or denigrated, due to their gender, that seems admirable. If that is what you mean, then maybe you mean to hope that we each care inclusively of any gender.
@GTMLosAngeles @Susan60 @marytzu @juliasnz @RolloTreadway
So if gender's not about physiology, or sex/rom tastes, to me that leaves arbitrary behavioural norms which get coerced on people. Some rebel. A subset reverse pronouns (which doesn't end coercion) & also bio markers (despite bio being irrelevant 😕).
The talk is what gender ISN''T - but if it's akin to core values could you give a +ive example & explain how that example necessarily links to *being man/woman* rather than generic person?
@FrightenedRat @Susan60 @marytzu @juliasnz @RolloTreadway
My 10-year old cisgender daughter talks about being a girl in a very fluid and comfortable manner, inclusive of activities not stereotypically female but glimmering in many things that are stereotypically female. It seems like a very comfortable and unrestrictive orbit for her.
My 10-year old enby talks about what they want and like and gets anxiously triggered by gender lines of any sort - bathroom signage or clothing categories, for example.
My 14-year old trans girl has similarly broad interests as our cisgender girl, appreciates the security of the “girl” orbit, but feels like she constantly has to course-correct (or deliberately decide not to course-correct).
In other words, I feel like they each have an innate sense of identity with gender as a component with wide variation among them. Over the years, they each let us know what gender identity best matches their inner state with social expectations.
My own experience has been fighting to stay in the boy orbit for decades, without ever realizing how much effort it was taking.
Perhaps that helps answer your question. But every experience may be unique.
@FrightenedRat @Susan60 @marytzu @juliasnz @RolloTreadway
As a further example, with the same teachers: we go shopping for clothes. The store has a girls section and a boys section.
Cisgender girl appreciates the girls section plans to make use of it, and knows that she will prefer the clothes there, but she’s happy to venture into the boys section to get a t-shirt with a character that she likes.
Enby is annoyed at the whole process, goes directly to the same choice of clothing every time, and wonders why they even have to be there at all.
Trans girl appreciates the girls section and uses it, but she knows it will be a struggle trying to find items that feel right.
I’m trying to convey the interaction between internal state and social expectations that they each navigate differently. This is just one of many, many factors they juggle every day. That juggling process is easier for some and harder for others, and changes for different social contexts, but the result always reflects a gender identity. And it is always easier when those around each of them are aware of and supportive of that gender identity.
@GTMLosAngeles @Susan60 @marytzu @juliasnz @RolloTreadway
I really appreciate your taking the time to reply. I was disappointed though because to me that's just interacting with the nonsense choices society lays out for us with it's fake Fem/Masc divides (not to mention navigating shops + fabrics/sizings etc 🤮). [I bought a sewing machine at 16 & only wore stuff I made.]
Am I looking for something deep when it really just is one's tolerance for an arbitrary norm set with arbitrary boundaries?
@FrightenedRat indeed gender isn't physiology and it isn't sexuality, but that doesn't mean you can perform a conceptual subtraction of those components and conclude that gender must be whatever else is left.
what is gender? my best answer to that is, it's a set of experiences - sensory, bodily, social, emotional, etc - that we have grouped together and put in this category. gender identity is said to be the sense of one's own gender, but for those of us who don't have a clear, strong sense of gender, or who are still exploring it, i think of it as a brief summary of one's gender experiences.
this makes gender, by its nature, multidimensional, nebulous, unstructured, without any particular core or primary component, and personalized to every individual. someone could share which gender experiences were most formative to them, and you could have conflicting experiences, or no equivalent experiences, or find them trivial.
therefore, i found learning about gender to be largely a process of listening to a great number of other people's experiences, and collecting the ones that felt relevant and meaningful to me. eventually i built up a sense of what constituted my gender and how it was different from other people's.
in that sense it was very similar to learning about neurodivergence; the constructs we have are similarly confusing, arbitrary, and possibly wrong, and we often figure out both the ideas and ourselves by relating (or not) to other people's experiences.
@Susan60 @marytzu @FrightenedRat @RolloTreadway @GTMLosAngeles @autistic.me @actuallyautistic I identify as gender neutral & yeah... gender is definitely imposed with an "agenda" a LOT... 🙄
That's probably another reason I will miss my partner so much... I have been able to stand next to them at "social" things & be "unavailable" without having to actually say...
"Back off or I will kick you in the nuts dude" 🤣 obviously I will have to find a more polite way of saying that 🤔... or hold a sign 🤷♀️ or just stay a hermit 🙄
@Susan60 @marytzu @FrightenedRat @RolloTreadway @autistic.me @actuallyautistic
I totally get what you are saying & I really hope we get to that point too because...
What I'm actually saying, probably ineptly... is
>>gender<< is a SOCIAL construct. Which, yeah, social constructs occur when people try to understand something & attach labels to it so they can categorize it... so, that >>they<< feel "comfortable" about it or more certain they can predict what will happen...
The "norms", "expected" behaviors, & "acceptable" roles associated with the gender labels change over time... & they are seriously just picked to reinforce the current "vogue"
For example, powerful dudes used to wear heels to make themselves taller... it was highly "fashionable" in the 17th Century ... not so much later on though, eh...
Like that is totally arbitrary 🙄 men can wear high heels it means they are rich... Oh, no men shouldn't wear high heels because those are for "females" (apart from cowboys because heels are actually pretty useful in stirrups...) Totally & utterly ARBITRARY just random 🙄
Personally, I think Gender Identity, the personal, internal sense of where on the spectrum of gender a person sees themselves is significantly let down by the fact that
A. It isn't binary so gender behavioral "expectations" based on a binary just pigeon hole people with "roles" instead of with their >>own<< individual talents & preferences.
B. Gender is a social construct & that construct is also arbitrary & CHANGES!
And yeah... saying that humans have "greater" than animals level of self "identity" << nope not true at all... animals are aware of themselves, their friends, their "frenemies", their offspring, their relatives... they play jokes on each other so as much as humans would like to say...
It is just an animal... I have news for them 🤣
Humans are also... just... another animal 😆 🤷♀️
@juliasnz @Susan60 @FrightenedRat @RolloTreadway @autistic.me @actuallyautistic
I think we are more or less in agreement Julie.
imo Gender is partially constructed I would say. That's my nuance to add.
And yeah I think subconsciously we emulate behaviors exhibited by role models of the morphology that roughly matches our subconscious sex.
Where it becomes a bell curve is there is so much variation in morphology, behaviours and even subconscious sex. ie Central Limit Theorem.
@juliasnz @Susan60 @FrightenedRat @RolloTreadway @autistic.me @actuallyautistic
And yeah it doesn't matter the substance of those behaviors. If pink frills are seen as masculine, then we would expect the majority (but not all) of boys to emulate it. Even the names could be completely flipped and it still works.
@juliasnz @Susan60 @FrightenedRat @RolloTreadway @autistic.me @actuallyautistic
Re: Susan
I think there's so much variation with trans people that it's impossible to make accurate generalizations here.
I would think in general they would widen the standard deviations of gender norms during transition. Not *always* before and after. But there's so many different flavors of them.
@juliasnz @Susan60 @FrightenedRat @RolloTreadway @autistic.me @actuallyautistic
But yeah it's the difference between the bulk of the distribution (cis) and the margins (trans), and keep in mind some of the latter aren't even on the margins, they just go from one (statistical) mode to the other (statistical) mode.
Regardless, they still tend to emulate behaviors that match their subconscious sex, it's just their subconscious sex doesn't match whatever is on their birth cert.
@marytzu @Susan60 @FrightenedRat @RolloTreadway @autistic.me @actuallyautistic it's great that each of us can view the ideas from our lived experience of them & learn from other people's lived experiences... I'm really comfortable being gender neutral & I've always BEEN gender neutral so I'm going to have a lack of insight into what someone who has a strong gender preference >>feels<< because I don't feel it... at all. It was interesting being literally told off for "confusing" behavior WITH >>identity<< because they are the same thing... >>for ME<<
Like, I didn't identify as being gendered as a child & through the sheer luck of having an incredibly preoccupied mother... she didn't even notice so I got to do whatever I wanted... most of the time 🤣
@marytzu @juliasnz @FrightenedRat @RolloTreadway @GTMLosAngeles @autistic.me @actuallyautistic
This makes sense to me. I’ve always pushed against any gendered bias because of my social justice thing, but as someone who is basically happy with the skin I’m in & being a “woman” on my own terms, it hasn’t been a thing running in the background. Whereas listening to/reading the thoughts of enby/trans people, it was a constant thing.
Having raised an ADHD/enby kid but not knowing about it until they were in their 30s, I can see these issues. My feminism meant they had opportunities to wear & be whatever, although some very gendered outfits were made by a grandmother. There might have been some unconscious gendering on my part, but I really tried to let them do whatever. (While I was an uncoordinated kid, I liked outdoor play, moderate tree climbing, imaginary games & even some rough house much more than dolls.)
But society being what it is, they still felt ambivalent about their gender, & the increase in self confidence & assertiveness since coming out as enby has been a wonder to behold!
FrightenedRat 🏴
Marytzu
Elisabeth M
TheClothesHaveNoEmperor
Julie Smith
Looking for explanations…
Green Roc Thoughts
Strypey
miaoue