Genderfluid, real or fake?

sleepy3

Banned deucer.
Simply what it says on the tin, is genderfluid real or is it fake? Personally I think there are only two genders, but for some reason this is a really divisive issue online. Apparently people think you can change genders by putting on different clothes and this make them genderfluid. Your thoughts>?
 

sleepy3

Banned deucer.
Gender =/= sex. Gender is an identity.
Can you explain this a little more? Other people have said this to me too and for the life of me i cant understand how gender isnt the same as sex. Pardon the crude language but if you're born with a penis it means you're a boy and vice versa if you're a girl? This is what i was taught and I'm a bio major lol
 

sleepy3

Banned deucer.
Just google it? You're not the only person to wonder this and there's some pretty clear explanations out there.

But basically some people don't identify with their biological gender.
Yes but if they dont identify with it dont mean they are not it though? For instance I'm serbian by ethnicity and i dont like serbian culture or identify with it but it still doesnt change that im serbian. If you see where im going with this
 
Yes but if they dont identify with it dont mean they are not it though? For instance I'm serbian by ethnicity and i dont like serbian culture or identify with it but it still doesnt change that im serbian. If you see where im going with this
Yeah you'd still be serbian, or of serbian descent, just like someone who was born male but identifies as a woman or not gender binary might be said to be biologically male or have the male sex.

If you were born in America, or if you come to America and get US citizenship or even just start living most of your life here you might want to identify as an American for personal reasons or because you feel it more accurately reflects your cultural standing. And I, looking at you, might feel the same way if you started calling yourself an American even if I can clearly recognize your ethnicity.

In the same way, someone who feels another gender better reflects their identity for their own reasons can in this modern day better express that, and others will recognize them. Trying to point out the "obvious" over and over again doesn't really do much and only stands to alienate them. Just like if I tell someone of a different ethnicity they aren't free to practice my culture or they can't call themselves an American, that's a pretty closed off and insensitive attitude. Because gender, as opposed to sex, is a social and cultural construct.

I never personally empathized with this as well as I'd like; my gender doesn't really factor into my identity, nor does another person's gender change how I treat them or think about them. But even though I don't understand its importance personally I know many people who do see their gender and their opinion on gender roles as important. I can see how their own self-perception affects them, and I can't help but embrace it.
 
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TheValkyries

proudly reppin' 2 superbowl wins since DEFLATEGATE
I think a fundamental thing that people miss about gender imo is your gender isn't necessarily entirely about YOU. Gender is a social construct, obviously, but this also extends further to how everyone's gender is constructed socially. This is tricky to understand, but ill give an example: often trans women describe the experience of before their transition they were ostracized for their feminine tastes for their feminine mannerisms, largely those around them said they "were not man enough". Once they've transitioned they still face harassment saying they aren't women enough either yet they are still treated to gendered treatment (read: being called gendered slurs or treated in ways that are common to what society sees as womanhood). Obviously it's not only about the worst of their experiences but the point is that even those who would try and argue "there's only two genders" blah blah and all that even THOSE people subconsciously treat trans women as women, or trans men as men, etc.

As for the specifics of genderfluid just simply put it's a person whose gender "presentation/performance" is both/neither male or female. It's simply an acknowledgment of the complexity of how we treat gender subconsciously as a whole and how they don't fit neatly into the predefined notions that we have.

And not to really get into too deep a conversation with op I'd say think about how in your example how easily you take what Serbian means. Cultural identities and gender identities are nebulous and encompass a lot of traits which also overlap with other disparate identities within their subgroup yet we act as if they are bounded as clear as day. Is your gender solely defined by your genitals or chromosomes? How does that model account for people who have a variety of chromosomes that aren't just XX or XY (Google: intersex people (i hate how intersex people have their existence turned into a rhetorical device in these conversations but it's hard for people to grasp that biological essentialism is fucking dumb as...)).
 

Pyritie

TAMAGO
is an Artist
it's a way for attention seeking millenials to say "look at me I think I'm more special than anyone else" because it turns out hey sterotypes aren't actually real people and not conforming to them is something everyone does
 
the idea of gender non-conformity exists on literally every inhabited continent. like i don't doubt that there are people who play gender-fluid for attention, but in my experience the straw man built up of a gender-fluid person has never described any of the gender-fluid people i've met. most of them are just trying to live honestly to themselves and have to deal with a lot ridicule and misunderstanding. it isn't stable androgyny or agender, its a changing identity on the scale between male and female. sometimes it's close enough to be recognisably male or female and sometimes its some form of androgyny. it's not some new thing made up to paint themselves special, what does anyone get out of denying gender-fluid people exist? even if it is a put on, how does it effect you in any way?
 

Pyritie

TAMAGO
is an Artist
most of them are just trying to live honestly to themselves and have to deal with a lot ridicule and misunderstanding. it isn't stable androgyny or agender, its a changing identity on the scale between male and female. sometimes it's close enough to be recognisably male or female and sometimes its some form of androgyny.
doesn't this require a constant comparison between yourself and the stereotypical male or female your own society has built up? what exactly constitutes being "more male" or "more female", and why do they have to be tied to gender-specific roles in the first place? just do what you enjoy without getting tangled in labels.
 

TheValkyries

proudly reppin' 2 superbowl wins since DEFLATEGATE
doesn't this require a constant comparison between yourself and the stereotypical male or female your own society has built up?
Like I said in my post that literally is what gender is but it's not just a self-comparison other people are comparing you to those ideas as well. Everyone is constantly doing that comparison subconsciously on themselves and others.
 
doesn't this require a constant comparison between yourself and the stereotypical male or female your own society has built up? what exactly constitutes being "more male" or "more female", and why do they have to be tied to gender-specific roles in the first place? just do what you enjoy without getting tangled in labels.
people like understanding themselves, labels allow them to do that. imagine living a life knowing you aren't like most people and not fully understanding how, but then you find something that describes how you feel about yourself and that despite being rare there are other people that feel like you. that's what labels do, by giving something a name it allows you to begin to understand it. gender exists beyond the socially constructed elements to it. gender =/= gender roles. if gender is entirely a social construct how do trans people exist? how can their gender be out of alignment with their sex if gender isn't real? why can't they just be happy without getting all tangled up in labels?
 

verbatim

[PLACEHOLDER]
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doesn't this require a constant comparison between yourself and the stereotypical male or female your own society has built up? what exactly constitutes being "more male" or "more female", and why do they have to be tied to gender-specific roles in the first place? just do what you enjoy without getting tangled in labels.
Because language does that already, it's called performativity.



if gender is entirely a social construct how do trans people exist? how can their gender be out of alignment with their sex if gender isn't real? why can't they just be happy without getting all tangled up in labels?
Sex isn't a social construct, it's a biological one. Gender is a social construct, also real.

To answer your last question, everyone uses labels. People don't think it's weird when others refer to themselves as white or black or hispanic, why should people think it's weird when others refer to themselves as a guy or a girl?
 
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Ash Borer

I've heard they're short of room in hell
I think "social construct" is a really dumb term if you're talking about gender, though. While it doesn't deny existence, it definitely implies arbitrarity. To quote the the wikipedia article "in that respect, a social construct as an idea would be widely accepted as natural by the society, but may or may not represent a reality shared by those outside the society, and would be an "invention or artifice of that society." Gender is not an invention of society. This ignores that gender is a nested web of interacting forces of evolution, and consciousness.

Qualities of masculinity and femininity and how they're distributed to the genders are obviously evolutionary derived. Emerging trends in physiology and psychology that differentiate the sexes are a direct result of their roles in reproduction. I mean just at the mechanical level of insemination, the existence of two sexes can be surmised to be derived from larger more powerful mono-celled life being able to penetrate and inject its DNA into smaller weaker ones. Even from the beginning of gender, what would become females were smaller. This difference in the sexes is then gripped by the forces of evolution and they changed in a compounding manner.

Just think about it. Females have to be debilitated by pregnancy and nursing for long periods of time, so it's not efficient for them to be the gender that has to take to the task of defense from predators, or hunting. Because females are delegated to child care by evolution, their psychology needs to adapt to it for the species to thrive. Infants are usually extremely annoying and hard to deal, so the female needs to have high propensity for compassion(love) to care for it without getting fed up and saying "I quit." Obviously being responsible for the more violent and cunning behaviors of the species, the males have their own roughly optimized psychology and physiology for this.

How can anyone look at the huge differences between sexes in our species, ponder on how they emerged over the last however many billions of years, and then think that gender is socially constructed?

What the genders encompass is an expression of the statistical tendencies of the sexes as their genetics dictate. The exact definitions can certainly by bent and modified by social forces, but they ultimately are a slave to biology. This is what I mean when I say a nested web of interacting evolutionary forces and consciousness. It's not a biological construct, or social construct. I would say gender is a biologically dominated construct that can be socially modified.


As an aside, it's because of statistics that I think transgenderism is very real. Anyone who has taken a statistics 101 course is familiar with the fact that any correlation is not perfect, and there are outliers. With such a large sample size of 7 billion+ humans, it would be impossible for there not to be exceptional cases where males or females are born with an exceptionally masculine or feminine personality. This means that there are going to be males that feel like the set of assumptions that someone has when they see someone as female suits them better, and vice-versa. Though I have a lot of trouble in believing in any sort of third gender, because of how deeply embedded two sexes is to being.. an animal on the planet earth! I'd wager it's a tumblr-tier invention to get lots of emotional support and acceptance from highly compassionate peers for being different, oppressed, and thus like them. This of course propagated to be real by the same people, as they have no choice to believe it to be, because they are so deeply (pathologically) compassionate, and denial would be a bit mean to someone that does not deserve it. They're basically acting out the feminine maternal extreme of unconditionally loving and believing everything their little baby expresses.
 

verbatim

[PLACEHOLDER]
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What the genders encompass is an expression of the statistical tendencies of the sexes as their genetics dictate. The exact definitions can certainly by bent and modified by social forces, but they ultimately are a slave to biology.
This is 100% incorrect. I have an exam so I can't be as verbose in my answer but I will say that the past one hundred years of science has been explaining why this is pseudoscience. In the mean time I'd encourage anyone interested in the issue to read up on cultural relativism. It is used more often in discussion on race but the same principles apply to gender and other social constructs.


I think "social construct" is a really dumb term if you're talking about gender, though. While it doesn't deny existence, it definitely implies arbitrarity. To quote the the wikipedia article "in that respect, a social construct as an idea would be widely accepted as natural by the society, but may or may not represent a reality shared by those outside the society, and would be an "invention or artifice of that society." Gender is not an invention of society. This ignores that gender is a nested web of interacting forces of evolution, and consciousness.
Gender is arbitrary. It's meaning is given to it by society.

Qualities of masculinity and femininity and how they're distributed to the genders are obviously evolutionary derived. Emerging trends in physiology and psychology that differentiate the sexes are a direct result of their roles in reproduction.
There are physical, biological differences between sexes (not genders), but not personality. When people in the know say that certain differences in gender are cultural, they mean that people who are identified as a certain gender are taught different things which influences their actions. Girls don't biologically like pin, girls like pink because it is marketed at them.

It is the same with race. The McGurk effect is a good demonstration of that.

How can anyone look at the huge differences between sexes in our species, ponder on how they emerged over the last however many billions of years, and then think that gender is socially constructed?
Why not? Social constructs are real and have huge influences on the way we live our lives.


Though I have a lot of trouble in believing in any sort of third gender, because of how deeply embedded two sexes is to being.. an animal on the planet earth!
There are many instances of third genders that are thousands of years older than tumblr.
 
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Pyritie

TAMAGO
is an Artist
if gender is entirely a social construct how do trans people exist? how can their gender be out of alignment with their sex if gender isn't real? why can't they just be happy without getting all tangled up in labels?
Because dysphoria exists and brains are complicated. Trans people want to go from A to B. I can understand that, and transitioning is the best treatment we have at the moment.

The only time I've seen "genderfluid" used in a way that makes sense was by someone who had dysphoria that came and went every day or two.

I feel like calling yourself trans or genderfluid when dysphoria isn't involved and you just feel less stereotypical, trivialises people who do have those problems. We already have words for that, like tomboy. I feel the same way about people who self-diagnose themselves as autistic just because they feel a bit shy.
 

Ash Borer

I've heard they're short of room in hell
This is 100% incorrect. I have an exam so I can't be as verbose in my answer but I will say that the past one hundred years of science has been explaining why this is pseudoscience. In the mean time I'd encourage anyone interested in the issue to read up on cultural relativism. It is used more often in discussion on race but the same principles apply to gender and other social constructs.
no, science absolutely has NOT been disproving sex correlated personality. The exact opposite. I'll preface by saying that personality psychology is not a very rigorously scientific field, but it is the only science we have to go on, so it's the best I can do evidence wise. Here is a quick article that cites a fairly methodologically sound study on this.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blo...-in-personality-are-larger-previously-thought

All science on the study of personality points to sex very deeply embedded in determining the personality of an individual, and our concept of gender embodies this. The definition of male and female as an identity, set of traits, role, whatever is a slave to biology, it is absolutely not arbitrary.
 
verbatim my last question was completely rhetorical, i would hope the rest of my post should have made my opinion on labels clear. my fault if that wasn't clear. labels help people to understand who they are and find people with similar experiences. both of which help validate them.

my point is that gender goes deeper than an interpersonal level. it's the psychological equivalent of biological sex. what Pyritie is saying makes no sense. the dysphoria comes from the fact that their gender, their understanding of who they are, is in conflict with the physical body they inhabit. it isn't some causeless pain. the desire isn't to go from "a to b", it's for their physical bodies to reflect who they are as a person.
I feel like calling yourself trans or genderfluid when dysphoria isn't involved and you just feel less stereotypical, trivialises people who do have those problems.
but who are you to comment on somebody else's experiences? like how do you know they aren't feeling any dysphoria? you can't be diagnosed with a gender identity. if someone is willing to put them self through the humiliation and needless ridicule that comes with being transgender or gender-fluid i'm not going to dismiss them because they don't seem sad enough.
 

verbatim

[PLACEHOLDER]
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in regards to there being a reason that certain things are associated with boys (trucks, toy guns, sports, etc.) and others are associated with girls (dolls, cooking, childcare, etc.). biologically it definitely makes sense for boys to be into more rigorous and exciting things and for girls to be into more nurturing and caring things of that sort. i don't think it's sexist to say this because there is a reason this stuff sells, and it sorta goes back to how we're built.
This is still assumption based on correlation and not causation. In a similar vein, people went around incorrectly saying that African's were biologically less intelligent than caucasians for hundreds of years.


WRT the shopping example, here's a really interesting article talking about advertisings role in the high ratio of men to women in American computer science. This trend is far less prominent outside of America. Russia in particular has a significantly closer ratio of male to female engineers than America.

Microsoft recently did a study of the low interest in engineering and technology among girls in Europe and concluded that it stemmed primarily from.
  • Conformity to social expectations
  • gender stereotypes
  • gender roles
  • lack of role models continue to channel girls’ career choices away from STEM fields

My overarching point is that the explenation isn't "girls naturally don't like engineering". Generally speaking, if someone explains a social phenomenon starting with "naturally", you should be suspicious.
 
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Martin

A monoid in the category of endofunctors
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Gender fluidity exists given that gender is not a purely biological concept; there are lots of social/psychological aspects to gender, and if someone identifies as neither male nor female the "third gender" concept of sociology kicks in, although you do admittedly get annoying people who claim to be gender fluid as a means of being an attention seeking and/or to use as a weapon against their parents (I have someone who used to be a friend IRL who is like this, and honestly it saddens me 'cause it completely undermines all the work which is being done to try and secure the equal LGBTQ rights that he monopolises every conversation he's in over whilst making him come across as a complete hypocrite).

That said, the idea of gender being described purely as a social construct as opposed to partially is something which I have always been a bit baffled by personally; while I don't disagree that there are definitely social aspects to gender as a construct, I fundamentally disagree with the idea that there aren't biological reasons why gender roles exist. I don't think that the concept of gender is simple enough to be described as either solely a social construct or solely a biological construct, and it's why I have never really liked people using the defense of "gender is a social construct" when discussing/debating topics surrounding it: it is a statement which tries to put a three-dimensional concept onto a two-dimensional plane with the intent of winning an argument, artificially creating a social high ground, getting a point across, or whatever other motivations people have for chucking the statement out without really thinking too much about it.

I believe that, as a construct, gender is an independent entity which is loosely tied into sex (a purely biological construct) in that there are minor differences between biological males and biological females who grow in a typical pregnancy (keyword: typical), ranging from the presence (and potentially ratio) of estrogen/testosterone to simple genetic differences, which alter behaviour in a typical member of each sex group (once again, the keyword here is "typical") both for the sake of maximising the success of the "sexual cycle" (there's probably an actual term for this which I cba to look up or remember) and for other reasons which likely tie into survival mechanisms we have used in the past. To take the simplest example of gender stereotyping (pink being girly, blue being boyish), there are studies which suggest that girls may be hard-wired in such a way which means they are more attracted to pinker shades than boys are (for example, take a study from 2007, for which the findings are explained in a reasonable level of detail here or in a much more condensed form here), and one of the theories behind its purpose is that our female ancestors did more berry hunting and, consequently, needed a way of having their eyes drawn to the ripe, red berries as quickly as possible, with people and primates generally noticing things that they like faster than things they don't like or are neutral about; another theory (this time my own) is that it may tie into the big, pink bums that baboons use to attract females, with the pink-loving mental wiring being shared. There is definitely the aspect of marketing behind the the gender association of these colours, for sure, but it is likely that these very marketing companies did similar (albeit less detailed) types of research before turning it into the mainstream cultural concept that it is today.

You can also see from research into gender dysphoria/gender identity disorder (GID)--a disorder which affects a person's sense of both gender identity and sex identity--that there is a link between the exposure to testosterone/estrogen in the womb and being transgender, with data collected from different types of twins indicating such a link--in a small study of around 51 pairs of twins (23 monozygotic (from one zygote) twins, 21 same-sex twins from different zygotes, 7 opposite-sex twins), all of the opposite sex twins showed signs of GID whereas nine of the monozygotic twins showed signs of GID (source). Obviously not every opposite sex twin is going to be GID--I'm an opposite-sex twin and neither me nor my sister are GID--but the fact that every one of the ones who were looked at in the investigation were concordant with GID is unlikely to be a coincidence despite the admittedly-small sample size. Being transgender, in turn, means that a lot of a person's characteristics are very typical of someone of the opposite gender, and while not all cases will relate as heavily to hormones as others, the investigation into twins which was done here does suggest that being in the womb with someone of the opposite gender can lead to exposure to unusual amounts of the other hormone and, consequently, may have a biological effect on gender identity.

While there is a large amount of biology behind it, ultimately you could be exposed to a large amount of estrogen in the womb and still feel male, which is why there are large social aspects of this; not everyone is born in such a way that means they will identify as one gender or another, and while biology is likely to have some kind of influence on someone's gender identity, I think a lot of people have to go through the process of learning about themselves and ultimately working out how they identify in society. I think I'm kind of girly in a lot of aspects, but I wouldn't ever identify as anything other than male, and I don't think I needed as much consideration to reach this conclusion as some people do. Some people take longer than others, and the concept of gender fluidity only ever comes in after you have gone through this process of personal discovery, and it makes sense that there are people simply don't feel male or female. That's totally ok too! Having a "neutral party" (for lack of a better term; I am aware that "neutral party" is a pretty terrible way of putting it) is important for ensuring the success of a lot of LGBTQ rights movements as well as when discussing because it provides a view that honestly is pretty hard to imagine for a lot of people. That said, I do think that a lot of people--especially when they're younger and less sure of their identity, sexuality etc.--do confuse having some aspects which are typical of the other gender with being genderfluid, and this is honestly something that a lot of people who argue that it doesn't exist like to pick up on and milk just because it is a low-hanging target for criticism of the concept. It comes back around to the thing I mentioned just a few lines up about how you can be a girly boy or a tomboy without actually identifying as the opposite gender or even as a third gender.

This post doesn't really have much of a goal to it; I started typing something and kind of extrapolated from there hahaha. Matters like this are important to talk about, so I just wanted to state my thoughts on it.
 
I think the evolutionary argument is interesting to think about and to an extent is useful in explaining the initial conditions of our society but I don't think it holds a lot of water as the needs of our society change to alleviate the constraints our ancestors had and as we become more self aware of concepts like personality and culture.

I don't think the statistics do enough to explain the causality behind them especially on a nature vs nurture scale, but even if they did it isn't exactly useful to make these classifications (correlative or causal) if individual personality is so complex and diverse that we don't have a clear idea of masculinity and femininity in the first place. Is the goal to be able to say that we should be putting women in certain positions because they are more likely to have certain dispositions, or at the very least strongly encouraging these choices with our culture? We already do that, and in my opinion that's to our great detriment. As an example I see tons and tons of very sharp, very creative women who are culturally discouraged from math and other scientific fields, and I see the effect even slightly different attitudes in other countries can have on this trend.

That's not even getting into how that paper was founded on a self assessment based on a simplistic understanding of personality. The way people see themselves, especially in a gender role sense, has a lot to do with their vision of the gender ideal that they see through the lens of culture, marketing, and education.
 

Martin

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I think the evolutionary argument is interesting to think about and to an extent is useful in explaining the initial conditions of our society but I don't think it holds a lot of water as the needs of our society change to alleviate the constraints our ancestors had and as we become more self aware of concepts like personality and culture.

I don't think the statistics do enough to explain the causality behind them especially on a nature vs nurture scale, but even if they did it isn't exactly useful to make these classifications (correlative or causal) if individual personality is so complex and diverse that we don't have a clear idea of masculinity and femininity in the first place. Is the goal to be able to say that we should be putting women in certain positions because they are more likely to have certain dispositions, or at the very least strongly encouraging these choices with our culture? We already do that, and in my opinion that's to our great detriment. As an example I see tons and tons of very sharp, very creative women who are culturally discouraged from math and other scientific fields, and I see the effect even slightly different attitudes in other countries can have on this trend.

That's not even getting into how that paper was founded on a self assessment based on a simplistic understanding of personality. The way people see themselves, especially in a gender role sense, has a lot to do with their vision of the gender ideal that they see through the lens of culture, marketing, and education.
I agree; ultimately there is a major cultural aspect, and it is the majority of the concept of gender. If marketting and societal roles didn't exist then there would be a significant decrease in this type of behaviour. All I wanted to say (which I could have probably done in a lot less lines) is that I think of that statement ("gender is a social construct") like a fact rather than an explicit truth: it covers a lot of bases reasonably well and is not explicitly wrong, but it does simplify the issue somewhat to the point where I don't necessarily think that an entire argument can hinge fully on the statement. Research and understanding is still in its early days, for sure, but when there is even reasonably primative research which suggests that biology has at least some effect (the extent of which is still a long way from being determined) I don't think that it is something that can be ignored to the extent that it often is.
 
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Yeah sure. I can't exactly state something as fact if we don't fully understand it. Imo it is a lot more useful to have the attitude that gender is a social construct because as I see it it's extremely mutable by social factors to the extent that if there's a biological aspect we may not even notice in comparison. I also see a lot of cultural effects as completely arbitrary but we're nowhere near introspective enough as a society to start deciding what kind of culture we want or even abstract ourselves from existing culture on a regular basis.

But yeah when I make a statement like that it's me trying my hand at being assertive to make a point clear lol. Sorry if it felt like I was oversimplifying.
 

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