To celebrate that i started hormones this week i want to share some more thoughts on gender which will basically be a repeat of what i have said in the past except perhaps a bit more structured:
my initial position:
gender is kind of bullshit, it is a social construct, something that has changed throught the centuries and through the nations, therefore no something innate to human nature but something that accrued through cultures and was educated on the people born on those cultures. this has imposed restrictions, limitants, cohertions and misery on a lot of people whose gender expression deviated from the norm. therefore gender should be abolished so that noone else feels constrained by its narrow edicts and we all get to express ourselves the way that makes us the happiest.
except...
it is not quite so simple now, is it?
because as it just so happens a lot of people actually do find a lot of worth in their gender, not just cis people but trans people as well. it feels kind of weird to fight for the right of trans women to be recognized as women and then to abolish gender so that the concept of “women” no longer exist. as @sigmaleph once said “dont abolish gender, some people are using it” (i have no idea if she still stands by those words)
so, how do we square that circle?
my short answer as of right now is that... we sort of can’t as of right now. the reason for this is that i feel we still dont actually, fully understand what gender is.
my second position:
i am a materialist, i am a determinist. i believe reality works by mechanizable, systematizable ways. i believe most if not all of human behavior is shaped, ultimately, by biology. culture and society is an expression of fundamental biological principles when observed in a macro scale. a lot of our current gender structures arose from the biological fact that humans are sexually dysmorphic and that females, if pregnant, tend to be a lot more vulnerable and in need of protection. (speaking in big, not wholly accurate terms, it is understood)
this is kind of the basis for evolutionary psychology.
with this in mind, i feel that most of the humanities (psychology, sociology, philosophy, etc) by putting their focus on human behavior as framed by culture and society tend to create models of reality that are... not inacurate necessarly but insufficient.
an analogy in physics: we have equations to descrive the actions and movements of gases whitout actually having to calculate the movements of every single atom. of course these models are under a lot of restrictions and assuptions due to the enviromental conditions and that is why we call them ideal gas equations.
likewise with newtonian gravity, newton managed to come up with an equation to descrive gravity, yet later it was discovered that this equation worked mostly on the macro scale, but when aplied to subatomic particles it didnt work as well.
what we have here is “toy models” that work on the macro scale that dont take into account the underliying fundamental reality. now to borrow programming lingo, it is front end interface, not back end programming.
and i think this is what is going on with our current sociological understanding of gender.
what i have observed:
gender is complicated. we try and come up with models that not only descrive how gender is expressed in society but why it is so. i feel these models are not very good. as with the example that i descrived at the beggining, we tend to fall into exceptions, little contradicitons or unexpected implications every time we try to create a concise description of gender. i think the best example of this phenomena is contrapoints video on trans trenders, wherein she tries to deconstruct gender in a way that made her gender expression valid and she... kind of came up short. in a later video she went on to explain that there might not be a rational explination for why a trans woman is a woman and that is just the way it is.
of course i dont agree with that.
again, i believe all human behavior can be explained with a sufficiently granular understanding of neurobiology. we are just no there yet. the point where the fallen mind meets the rising neuron. sure we can say that trans people are valid, and that non binary people are valid and that agender people are valid, and gender fluid, and bigendered, and so and so forth. but at some point we have to ask ourselves: what is actually going on there. why so many different people express their identity in so many different ways. what is the underliying cause. this clearly transcends culture since if it were the case that culture is the ultimate shaper of who and what we are then trans people wouldnt exist since our culture has been very clearly and very strongly hetero binary for ages. yet something within us, something that can arise from no other place but the configuration of our neurons, rebels against this. in many different and nuanced ways. WHAT IS THAT SOMETHING?
a personal example:
how do i experience my trans identity? through very mild body dysphoria for the most part. i feel being considered a man is insufficient for me, it leaves me with a hollow feeling most of the time. i get an unbridled sense of joy out of dressing as a woman, and looking like one. when i percieve that i have hormones feminizing my body i get the good dopamine hit we are all chasing like blind monkeys on our day to day life. my heart swells by just writing this: i have estrogen in my body now and it is feminizing me and it is great. does that make me, put in very blunt, very basic, very simplified and base terms: “a woman”?
i dunno.
but why is this?
what mechanisms are inside of me that takes these inputs: [feminized body/being called a woman/etc] and give in return these outputs: [JOY]
the reason for these thoughts:
i dont know what to call myself. no descrption that i have found suits me. yes, that’s right, you heard it here folks! the left has spent years and all their efforts in coming up with a hundred billion new identities and i dentify with none of them! arent i just the biggest, most soy drenched snowflake of the entire snowglobe?
but jokes aside. i dont feel the current myriad labels suit me because i feel none of the adress the underliying reality.
the territory has barely been explored, the map is blurry and being constantly rewritten as we speak. humans are not just “men & women” and i believe they are not either “man, woman, womyn, softboi, transfemme, androgyne, etc, etc, etc”. these are insufficient.
perhaps once we finally understand the human brain in all of its absolute, fractal complexity we will have the one true theory of gender, perhaps in some future there wil be no men or women but Monozygote-delta-X65 as fit within the sine function of lambda, where lambda is the values for certain levels of cortizol in the brain during the first three weeks in utero. and we will still call ourselves men and women and what else because humans are just like that.
a girl (such as i) can dream.