25 upvotes, 4 direct replies (showing 4)
View submission: Do non-binary identities reenforce gender stereotypes?
I've always had the same opinion, and it has only been reinforced over the years when (in pleasant debates with friends of who describe themselves using various gender terms), no one has been able to describe any gender to me without resorting to using cultural stereotypes or describing a person's sex (physical attributes).
If gender is entirely a cultural belief that only exists in each form within the culture that people are immersed in, then the concept of gender itself isn't really anything but a social convention that reinforces stereotypes.
Comment by ta0029271 at 14/01/2025 at 09:34 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I agree, I'd go further to say that in most contexts "gender" is a useless term. The people who talk about gender being different to sex always start by talking about social constructs but really it always boils down to each individual just choosing their gender, which doesn't work in real life.
Comment by twinkie2001 at 12/01/2025 at 14:45 UTC
2 upvotes, 2 direct replies
You sound like a radical left wing gender abolitionist 😆 /s
In all seriousness I tend to see it the same way, but I also recognize there are many things about this world I don’t understand yet still choose to respect.
Comment by AlmostCynical at 12/01/2025 at 17:24 UTC
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
I’ll have a go. This is more analogy than science, but trust me with it. For various reasons, the human brain has an innate and immutable gender identity, think of it like a pin on a big cork board. The majority of people end up with a gender identity clustered around the pins of others with the same sex. Not necessarily the exact same, but in roughly the same area. Because biology is inherently complex and imprecise, sometimes the process goes wrong and someone ends up with a gender identity pinned in the cluster that’s mostly people with the opposite sex. For others, the pin may be wildly off away from any clusters and for others they might not have a pin on the board at all.
The part where society comes in is in grouping these clusters. As you know, humans inherently like to form groups and gender is no different. Think of ‘genders’ in society as some red string wrapped entirely around a cluster of pins. Because most people fall into two clusters, it’s completely natural to form two genders which is what most societies have done, but that’s not the only possibility. Maybe a big cluster has a bit of a tail and a separate piece of string gets wrapped around it (to tie it back to the real world, this could be everyone who still considers themselves a woman but has always felt a strong desire to be gender nonconforming), or maybe there’s a small cluster somewhere else on the board that nobody else pays attention to but the people in that cluster have circled it themselves. You could also assign a single term to everyone outside of the two main clusters as a linguistic convenience.
Society can also shift the strings around to change the boundaries of a designated gender and anyone left outside of those boundaries has to go against their identity a bit in order to make it look like their identity is within it.
This doesn’t map perfectly onto the various ways gender manifests and is defined within society, but I hope it’s close enough to explain it!
Comment by TankieErik at 12/01/2025 at 20:44 UTC*
1 upvotes, 2 direct replies
I can describe how I experience gender - an inherent sense of the kind of body parts and hormones that feel right to me. Not a cultural belief. Not everyone experiences it this way but I do, I would still be what I am with or without society. I'm saying this as someone who's had a sex change btw this is not me saying that your assigned sex is the one that determines your gender. I'm saying that gender is a real thingand trans people are absolutely a real thing.