Comment on How do you "feel" gender?

• richieadler@lemmy.myserv.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  How so?

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  • kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Sex means a couple of different things:

    1. Of the physical characteristics that organisms use to reproduce in a way that combines their genomes, which category an organism or a part thereof fits into at a particular time
    2. The act of reproducing in this way (short for “sexual intercourse,” but the long version is rare outside formal scientific contexts)

    Gender means even more things:

    1. A euphemism for the first meaning of sex
    2. The sex (1) that someone wants to have, usually when talking about someone with dysphoria (whose body does not initially match that sex)
    3. The societal roles that are placed upon people of a particular sex(1)

    Trans people were referred to for some time as “transsexual,” because their sex(1) does not match their desired sex(1), but people kept conflating it with sex(2), due to the similarity to words like “homosexual,” which is about sex(2). Thus, it was changed to “transgender,” relying upon (or potentially creating, I’m not sure about the history) gender(2).

    This makes discussion of gender(3) more difficult, especially when it does not align with someone’s gender(2), especially when that does not align with that person’s initial sex(1).

    The person to whom I replied has a sex(1) of female. They also have a desired sex(1) of female, and that desire is somewhat strong. That’s helpful for them, because dysphoria is by all accounts quite unpleasant. Their gender(1) and gender(2) are both woman.

    Because that person is AFAB and satisfied with that, society is highly likely to assign them the gender(3) of woman. However, while they don’t specifically oppose that role, they aren’t thrilled with it either. One can fairly easily imagine another individual for whom the role is hated, but who is also satisfied with their body, making their desired gender(3) different from their assigned gender(3).

    What do we call that hypothetical person? Anything to do with “sex” is probably out, because that refers to either attraction or body type. “Transgender” is already in use to refer to people who aren’t satisfied with their body (or, if sufficiently young, the way in which their body will develop without intervention).

    “Gender non-conforming” is probably the closest to what we want, but what if the person wants to conform to a gender, just not the one assigned to them? That is to say, what if this person’s relationship to gender(3) is similar to a trans person’s relationship to sex(1), rather than a nonbinary person’s relationship to the same? We could just use the term anyway, but it’s imprecise in this context.

    Heck, what word do we use for the person to whom I initially replied? “Cisgender” is more or less correct, but incomplete; they certainly aren’t trans in the common sense, but they aren’t quite as cis as most people either. “Gender non-conforming” isn’t really correct, since they do mostly conform to their assigned gender(3), they just do so out of convenience rather than a sense that that’s who they were meant to be. “Agender” usually implies someone who also doesn’t identify with a sex(1) or gender(1), which is incorrect.

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