Is gender binary?

[supergee]

Sanity from an old friend

Comments

[cmcmck]

Although dysmorphia and dysphoria are not the same thing and your old friend forgets that some of us are born with intersex conditions to complicate things even further...........

[arlie]

My sarcastic belief is that gender is important - and forcibly imposed - because that allows some people to be "better" than others, and assign those others roles that they all semi-consciously believe that no one would ever want, short of lots of brain washing. I have met people who liked various aspects of their cultures' "female" role, or even apprciated the whole package, but vanishingly few of them showed any sign that they'd have liked it in the absence of believing it to be "natural" for them.

That said, I can remember being of an age where playing at being an adult member of my assigned gender - whether dressing up or games that amounted to role play - was a natural and attractive thing. It doesn't make sense to my adult self, but it seems to have been a thing, and might be some kind of innate pre-programming (pick what to learn based on gender) rather than entirely cultural. It's even possible - though unlikely - that if I'd had talents for female-assigned tasks, and didn't constantly fail at them, whie succeeding spectacularly at male-assigned tasks, I might have come to think of the female ones as "natural" for me. But mostly I'm not cut out to be a supporter to someone else's role as star, and few Aspies are going to thrive when assigned "social" and "emotional" tasks. (I wasn't issued "soft skills" along with my uterus, nor does it give me the inability to think 'rationally' some have insisted it must.)

And males get pushed towards performing their assigned roles too, often with insults claiming that they are feminine/effeminate.