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Are there only two genders?

Discussion in 'Gender Identity and Expression' started by The1nkling, Apr 12, 2017.

  1. i am just me

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    This is exactly the thing that differentiates people not conforming to their assigned gender role from nonbinary people. I don't like generalizations so I will mainly talk about my personal experience and try to explain the difference. I imagine that Creativemind and I might act quite similar in society. However I hate being seen as a woman and if someone addresses me as one, I get dysphoric. I even think part of my gender-non-conforming behaviour stems from not actually being that gender. I subconsciously want to show people they shouldn't put me in this box. But: I am rather sure that I am not male either because e.g. I'd hate having a penis and would probably get very dysphoric about my bottom if I had one. But I suffer from body dyshoria in a women's body as well. My breasts feel like they don't belong on my body, my hips seem too wide etc.

    So what I'm trying to say is that gender roles and gender identity are of course not the same. I guess most people on here will agree that our society needs to accept that everyone should be allowed to express their gender the way they want to. It's not the goal of me as a nonbinary person to invalidate masculine women or feminine men. Even categorizing behaviour as masculine and feminine is problematic. Gender roles are very restricting. They establish a norm and everything that's different from that norm is seen as less legitimate. I hate that.

    However it's not mine or anyone's right to invalidate anyone else's experience of gender. You can't know how I as a nonbinary person experience gender, so it's simply not your right to tell me what I feel doesn't exist. Why should you know better than I? After all, you've never been in my mind and I have spent large parts of my life on trying to make sense of myself.

    As someone else has mentioned, the same arguments that are brought up against the existence of nonbinary genders have been used against binary trans people in the past. But it's not your right to decide who I have to be, the same its not my right to decide who you are.
     
    #61 i am just me, Apr 14, 2017
    Last edited: Apr 14, 2017
  2. EverDeer

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  3. bringIt

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    I guess that like with bisexuality and asexuality there are some 'in between' genders of male and female as well. But then again they are all just words. Every person has their own unique sexuality and their own unique gender identity. It's all just generalised for simplification.
     
  4. Cailan

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    #64 Cailan, Apr 15, 2017
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  5. Gengars

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    Gender is a human construct. It's used as a tool, much like everything else in our society such as language, currency, social structure, etc. That being said, the notion of gender is different from culture to culture. And to the disbelief of most westerners, there are more than two genders found in cultures around the world, shocker! In ancient Hawaiian culture, there were traditionally three genders until Christian missionaries came along to abolish this "pagan heathenry" (the short documentary A Place in the Middle can will explain this better than I ever could). Pre-colonial Incas had shamans who took on the role of a third gender as well, and there was even a god to reflect this. The list goes on and on.

    Gender is a much more fluid and diverse thing than people realize. Unlike sex, it's not a concrete thing that just exists, like the sun or the moon or the birds. Much like the colors on the rainbow (or the electromagnetic spectrem if you wanna get scientific), gender identity is truly a spectrum. There is no true cut-and-dry "male to female" divide. It's all relitive. Using that logic, you could say that instead of just two genders, there could be three, six, 24, infinite genders! However, techinically since it's entirely a human construct, I often like to joke about gender not being "real" or simply not existing. However, I'm no expert in the field of gender, but I've consumed a lot of media on the matter, and being wierd about gender myself, I've had a lot of time to think about it. Idk ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
     
    #65 Gengars, Apr 15, 2017
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  6. Cailan

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    Gender is NOT a human construct. Gender is the brain processes/structure/wiring that produces thought processes associated with one of the two sexes. Because there is no third sex in the mammalian and therefore human existance, there is no third gender (or fourth or three, six, 24 genders). There is male/masculine and female/feminine, and a spectrum between them of various mixes of masculine and feminine. The non-binary genders are NOT a third gender, but various mixes of the two genders, or the lack of gender identity (agender).

    Gender preferences are indeed a human construct. What color is associated with a certain gender, what styles are associated with a gender. High heels were first worn by men. Pink used to be a masculine color. A thousand years ago everyone wore dresses, both men and women. The fripperies associated with male and female change over time according to fashion and cultural values.

    Some cultural roles are human constructs (women are teachers, men are engineers), but many are based on the differentiated physiology of the sexes and behavorial tendencies of the genders. Women raise the children because we have mammary glands that can feed them during their first few years (never mind modern advances, we're talking millions of years of evolution, not a thousand years of bottles and goat's milk). Men rarely can do that. Men do the heavy lifting because they are, on average, larger and much stronger. Women are gatherers because it's a job that can be done while carrying a child around, or keeping an eye on the kid. Men are hunters because they're larger and faster and aren't as burdened by childcare. It has all been defined by evolution and survival, and in humans is little different from the gender roles of any other male and female mammals, from gorillas to horses to wolves to rats.
     
  7. Simple Thoughts

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    Yes it's true that evolution has lead to certain general trends among men and women, but that's just general trends not anything absolute. That doesn't apply to all men and all women. It applies to a majority for sure though.

    I'd also like to point out that even if that is evolutionarily true it's no longer necessary for our survival as a species. Now people are free to do as they please, and not everyone wants to be boxed into these outdated gender roles that stopped being relevant as we developed technology.