@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 @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 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.

@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.