Katchoo, confused by gender

Good Question! When I really think about it the only thing that comes to mind is gender is how an individual relates to the world through either their maleness, femaleness or otherness. But that begs the question what is maleness, femaleness or otherness. If they are truly socially constructed and have no inate biological fondations then “gender” for all intensive purposes doesn’t exist, other than what they were specifically constructed for. My gut tells me that isn’t the case. Certainly their are gender norms that are gross social constructs. But their are others that seem to be more primal, biological.

My question to more knowledgeable individuals. Is there evidence of universal patterns of gendered behavior?

 

You can look at especially progressive countries and see that men and women do naturally tend to pick specific occupations. There aren't many female oil drillers. This isn't because women can't be, but because they don't want to be. There is also some research into gender non-conformity that shows that boys and girls do tend to pick specific toys. Boys like trucks, and girls like dolls.

The problem is that you get that one male who says "But I played with dolls" or girl who says "I played with trucks" and it's supposed to completely blur all the lines, but I think if there is no such thing as a biological gender, then gender dysphoria must be confusion, and then that means there is no such thing as a transgender person.

So for me personally, that means I'm not transgender. But I'm not "cis gender" either because there is no such thing. There is just what I choose. If all I am is what I choose then why are there so many confused people questioning gender? They shouldn't be confused.

It's just weird to me that 95% of men dress and act like men and 95% of women dress and act like women. How would that be the case if there wasn't a biological component? That seems like way too high of a number to just be a coincidence or just because society is implicitly pushing for it.

 

Here.

Sure I agree that there is some social conditioning, but there is a difference between "women wear pink, men wear blue" and "men dress in a way that is masculine, women dress in a way that is feminine". Men dress in a way that informs people that they are men, and women dress in a way that informs people that they are women. If an average naked man and average naked woman are standing next to each other you could tell who was who by looking at their sex characteristics. Men would have a penis, women a vagina. Men would have broader shoulders, and women broader hips, etc. Clothing is a covering, but it is a covering that informs us of what is underneath. In that sense a man wearing a sweetheart cut dress is wearing clothing meant for the opposite sex. It's not cut to conform to the shape of a man, which is why most, but not all, men wear clothes meant for male bodies. Wide shoulders. Narrow hips. Larger torsos, etc.

Let me tell you, as a transgender person I've struggled with women's clothing and I've busted the stitching in the shoulders of many outfits, but my natural hips fall right through openings not meant for male bodies.

 

Because everyone has heads and arms and legs. Clothing has to be made to fit the way our human bodies are. There are similarities, but there are also huge differences. Men don't need boob space in their shirt.

 

Most (but not all) men do not want to wear a sweetheart cut dress. The sweetheart cut is about showing off breasts, and hips. Men don't need that. Just like women don't need extra space in their pants between their legs, and thus have no desire to show off "extra crotch space". That's why there is no market for it. Because the clothes don't match the body so they don't buy them.

 

I'm answering your question. Because men aren't women and they generally don't want to or have a need to wear dresses. I think you should ask these questions to cis-straight men if you are still unsure of what I'm saying. I'm transgender. I've been wearing dresses and women's clothing since I was a kid. It's different for straight cis guys. There is no market for men's dresses because they don't want to wear them.

 

Interesting conversation here. I think you’re both right. Culture plays a huge role in how people act amongst their society, but it’s undeniable that biology also plays a huge role in how we feel and interact. That doesn’t mean that people aren’t born, each unique, with a chemical make up that may veer toward the feminine or masculine, even within their personality.

I was just thinking that maybe a good way to look at men and women in regard to social conditioning, would be to look at tribal peoples who live almost completely outside of westernized culture. Sometimes you can’t tell the men and women apart at first glance. But when looking deeper, there are ways that each biological sex seems to celebrate that part of themselves, and that might set a certain precedent for what we would understand as gender. I don’t know...

 

This concerns me. I can't help but feel that, statistically, we're all data points in the population and equally relevant. I suspect that any final distribution of the identity of individuals would fall on a U-shaped distribution, with some assertively claiming an exclusively male or female identity, others claiming one or the other because it seems right or just out of convention, and a relative few who feel that they have to recognize aspects of both genders (or neither, as the case may be.) Personally, I see the lines as being limits; as a practical matter, the concepts of being more male than male or more female than female are left undefined.

That said, in the words of statistician George Box, "All (statistical) models are wrong, but some are useful!" Viewing things as well defined lines helps some. While I personally tend to avoid claiming any gender identity these days, the concept of a nonbinary pretty much saved my life once I realized that my trying to fit into a traditionally male profession and mindset was the chief source of my depression and self-hatred. YMMV (and I am extremely grateful that we are allowed to individuate.)

 

To me the term "Gender" is a social construct based on a Biological foundation. The biological portion is obvious in some ways and not so obvious in others. Most males and females are not only physically different, but also wired differently. IMO the wiring part is perhaps somewhat established at birth, but the changes we go through in puberty are not only physical, they also affect how we are wired and the continuing influence of Hormones drives us much more than most people are aware (I have and do take hormones to feel more at home in my body and my experience is that they globally affect us not just physically but also mentally). The catch is for many of us in here the biological foundation both physically and mentally falls outside of the typical male and female makeup.

So though "Gender" is a social concept and varies with the culture and what we perceive as male or female it is still rooted in our physiology. The thing that I find the most vexing about it is that gender really isn't a Binary thing or even a multiple choice thing... It's more like a line segment with male at one end and female at the other with traits considered male or female clustered at one end or the other with an infinite number of points in between. So we keep adding new names without there really being any truly clear definitions so what bi-gender means to one individual may mean something very different to the next, compounded by the fact that in different societies some of the same traits may be considered more male or female... Clear as mud. So for me the answer of what gender am I varies and it's often easier to say what I don't identify with than what I do.