1 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Do non-binary identities reenforce gender stereotypes?
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 thegimboid at 12/01/2025 at 19:15 UTC
11 upvotes, 1 direct replies
The problem I have with this description is that you still haven't defined any gender identities. You've attempted to define gender (which still doesn't quite work for me, but it's a decent description), but it means nothing if you can't actually define any of the genders themselves without relying on outdated stereotypes.
For instance, what makes a person have a male gender once you remove any societal stereotypes (and of course not counting the physical attributes that make up "sex")?
Is it how someone dresses?
How they act?
What they like to do?
What they look like?
Those all just appeal to those same stereotypes that derive from societal formations.
How they feel?
Doesn't that also rely on connecting to stereotypical mannerisms or preference of physical body (which would be sex, not gender)?
Can you define any specific gender for me?
That's where people tend to fall down in any discussion I've been in - when they stop defining the concept of gender as a whole and start trying to define any individual gender itself.
Thanks for discussing though - none of what I question is ever meant to offend, I'm merely curious about something that's a huge part of society, and which I've never understood. I wear and act how I want to be and consider my "gender" to be "me". The whole concept of gender just seems like a way of saying "my personality" in a way that harkens back to (and reinforces) sexist stereotypes.