Comment on Being Trans Isn't Normal or Part of Nature...or is it...?

• Honytawk@feddit.nl ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Sex is biology, gender is sociology.

  Your biological sex is the physical manifestation. It involves your genitals and genes. That is why it is called a sex-change and not a gender-change.

  Your gender is how society perceives you. It is a spectrum between masculine and feminine. And not a single person in this world is pure masculine or feminine, since it also differs between societies. Like wearing a skirt is seen in most places as something feminine, but go to Scotland and there it is masculine.

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  • ewigkaiwelo@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    [deleted]

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    • SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      It’s not actually called “sex change surgery” it is called gender affirmation surgery and/or gender reassignment surgery.

      So it’s not so much a misnomer as it is uninformed people using the wrong terminology entirely.

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      • ewigkaiwelo@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        [deleted]

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    • Electricd@lemmybefree.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I believe you are technically correct

      Problem is everyone has a different definition of the words, but I believe that from the scientific POV it is true

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  • ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Your gender is how society perceives you. It is a spectrum between masculine and feminine

    Not quite. It’s got nothing to do with how people perceive you. A closeted trans woman is still a woman, even though she’s perceived as a man.

    It’s also not inherently defined by femininity or masculinity. You can be a masculine woman or a feminine man, or you can simply not give a shit about masculinity or femininity (this is me). Society defines what we consider masculine and feminine, and creates powerful associations between these behaviours and gender, but the association is “after the fact”

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  • merc@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    go to Scotland and there it is masculine.

    I wouldn’t say that. In Scotland wearing a skirt is still seen as feminine. Wearing a very special kind of skirt is seen as masculine in certain contexts. If you’re wearing a kilt, a sporran (the purse thing), knee length socks, the right kind of shoes, etc. it’s definitely a masculine style of dress. But, without all the accessories it’s more ambiguous whether it’s male or female. And if it’s not a tartan at all – say a miniskirt, that’s definitely still feminine in Scotland.

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  • Karl@literature.cafe ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Got it.

    Your gender is how society perceives you. It is a spectrum between masculine and feminine.

    So, what is gay, lesbian etc? If they are genders, aren’t there masculine gay men and feminine lesbian women? Aren’t those terms based on what the biological sex is + what gender(sex?) a person is attracted to?

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    • xvapx@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Gay and lesbian are not describing gender, but sexual attraction.
      Sexual attraction has been traditionally part of the gender identity, as have been other factors like dressing style, hobbies, home and work responsabilities, and a lot more.
      Most sexual attraction descriptions are very subjective, because they sometimes describe gender and sometimes sex.

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      • Karl@literature.cafe ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        So, our terminology needs to be updated.

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    • EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Gay, lesbian, etc. are sexualities, which has nothing specifically to do with gender per se. Gender is a performance we do based upon what our culture expects of us based on specific labels and (often physical) traits. Think “goth girl” or “punk” or something. When given a label like that, you probably thought of a specific set of physical traits and behaviors, including fashion, hairstyle, and makeup. That’s gender in a nutshell. Sexuality is more “if not attractive, then why x shaped?”

      It gets complicated because people really like to put things into an either/or box when life is so much more than a or b. Originally, sexualities were defined as two states: heterosexual and homosexual. Hetero, meaning other, means an attraction to the other sex (generally thought of as the opposite sex/gender due to a lack of information on intersex folk and the aforementioned two boxes appeal in the human psyche). And the opposite would be homosexual - an attraction to people of the same sex. But this is an elementary level of understanding, like when we teach kids about the 3 states of matter and leave out things like plasma.

      Because people have preferences and all straight men aren’t attracted to 100% of women, and then there’s lesbians and gay men and bisexuals and then there’s how gender presentation plays into our attraction like with butch vs femme lesbians or how men and women both can appreciate a girl who could bench press them. And then some people are into femboys and women only while some are into men that belong in the Scottish Highlands wearing kilts and claymores and women who own fainting couches and ball gowns and wouldn’t even glance at anything outside of those 2 groups, and then some people are only attracted to specific body parts (dick or pussy) but are less strict on who those parts are attached to, and then there’s the people who don’t care about anything beyond personality, and then…the list goes on and on.

      And then it gets even more complicated when you start talking about romantic attraction, because that’s entirely its own spectrum as well. People can be romantically attracted to the same or different genders compared to sexual attraction. Some people are sexually attracted to multiple genders but could only see themselves dating one specific gender, some people experience no romantic attraction at all or no sexual attraction, or even both together. The human brain is a massive mess and there’s simply no way to easily quantify the human experience - if we even can at all. I saw a post recently that went something like “the brain is 3lbs of mostly fat puppeting a meat suit by using less electricity than a light bulb, and if it can hallucinate algebra into existence then I’m fully willing to believe that it’s also capable of identifying its own gender” and I think that sums it up pretty nicely.

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      • ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        The only thing I would add to your post is that whilst gender is a performance, that’s not all it is. It can also be, and very often is, an internal sense of identity distinct from the social manifestation of that identity.

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