Board Thread:Fun and Games/@comment-48285-20161205164344/@comment-26871067-20170620002514

You're still a mess, yes. But you're a mess who thinks you have science on your side and a mess who thinks you're being polite and disconnected from the emotional component of this (or so it seems, I'm not in your head). I've lived in a lot of places throughout my life, and every doctor I've ever had (or my family members have had) disagrees with you. I'll take that lived experience and opinion of several medical professionals, whether primary care physicians, specialists, psychologists, and psychiatrists, over a 17 year old boy's perspective. I've got a doctor for every year you've lived, and that's not an exaggeration.

While your physical body is generally the base line for what gender you're assumed to have and there is generally speaking correlation between parts and gender, the concept of gender itself is, like baseball, something humanity came up with. Does it exist? Yeah. Does it matter? Yeah, but because we decided it did. As for the matter of male/female vs man/woman, which you seem to be considering to be the same thing, that's just incorrect. I know plenty of trans people who have no issue with saying "I'm biologically [x]" in contrast to their gender. At the same time, the majority of the trans people I've met consider their bodies to not match their brains and experience severe body dysphoria because they feel wrong and trapped. That's why people transition physically. That's the outright medical treatment for gender dysphoria - transition. Not "we're going to "fix" you so you consider yourself to be what we say your genitals make you".

The idea of gender as strictly determined by the sexual binary (which even then is not a rule of humanity) typically seen in human beings is fundamentally a Western European one. Plenty of cultures had more than two genders before colonization and extermination of the native populations either suppressed or almost outright destroyed these perspectives. Because plenty of cultures viewed sex and gender as linked-but-not-identical concepts. Since, unlike species, gender is a concept we cooked up because of how we classify objects and need to put things into categories, we are able to have experiences that aren't expected from our gender. We can't experience what a gorilla experiences, whether formulatively or as an adult. You can't have the experience of something 60 years older than you because you didn't live through that. You can have the experience of a woman while being told you're a man, because we came up with the idea that "man" was a thing and placed importance on it. Some cultures decided there were more than just man and woman. Sex was in general fundamental (but not static). We have parts. But gender as categories and importance being given to these parts was something humanity decided to do.

We could have picked loads of things, hair color, eye color, height (and sure there are some common cracks about height, but they're not outright Types Of People). We picked genitals and skin color as ways to categorize people. We could have picked basically anything to say "this difference between this group of people and another is important and forms part of your identity". This is what we picked, and I think that was pretty stupid given how inconsistent that is. But it's wired into us to categorize, because when we were living in caves we needed quick ways to identify whether or not people were part of our groups. That was a long time ago in our species' history. We don't need that anymore, but the junk DNA is still hanging around.

So here's a thought. If a cis woman is born without functioning ovaries, is she not a woman? If someone doesn't produce gametes, are they neither male nor female? What decides your biological sex - your genitals, your DNA, your hormone levels, your brain structure? What happens when none of them match? That's all rhetorical, of course. I don't have an answer for that. Which is why I think that saying gender is the same as sex is flawed. You can't really center an argument around something with no guidelines, and even then... who cares? Why do we need this to be so important that we're willing to attack people for not fulfilling our expectations of it? There's plenty of horror stories of abandonment, mutilation, assault, murder.

Nothing's clear-cut and nothing ever has been, honestly. And nothing is static. Changing our way of doing things because of new information is in fact how we should do things. If we remain static as a society we're fucked, because the world's going to keep turning and things are going to change, we're going to realize we're doing things wrong or that we're doing things right or that we could do things better. As our knowledge changes, so should our actions. The guidelines we come up with that are centered around things that don't matter? They should be structured with the thought of respect towards people's wishes, as long as those wishes aren't harmful.

My thought on gender is pretty simple I think. We came up with it, so we can change it. We've done it in the past and we can do it again, and I think we should do it. If an arbitrary decision is the difference between life and death (because this rhetoric of "you're acting against God/the "Biological Truth" - it's the same concept pretending to be the exact opposite - leads to people being murdered or tormented into suicide), wouldn't you prefer the choice that doesn't lead to death? I hope with all my heart that you'll never have to live through losing someone because of something so trivial. It's a truly awful experience.

But I guess I'm not going to argue so much with a 17y/o. Feels bad to do. Any other questions?