i must point out that we don’t tend to think of “brunette” and “blonde” as social constructs, even though those aren’t perfect labels either

we have labels to describe things. the overwhelming majority of human beings are one of XX or XY, with nothing interfering with expression. so we came up with labels for those two things.

no, we came up with labels for social categories based on division of labor, and assigned people to those categories based on arbitrary physical characteristics. a lot of cultures use the same binary distinction we do, and lots of cultures did it differently. it’s ethnocentric to talk about the western model of gender as though it were universal

iii am pretty confident that we came up with the labels first, based on the rough shape of body that could make babies and the rough shape of body that could punch tigers. then we invented civilization but still based everything on violence, and it turned out the latter group were better at violence so they got to be in charge.

ethnocentric? hmm. something that immediately strikes me about all three of these articles is that they define the other genders in terms of male and female.

which makes sense, because, how else could you? what is gender, if not sex as viewed through the lens of human complexity?

so while the idea of having only male and female may not be universal, having those as categories at all sure seems to be

also I’m distinctly uncomfortable with saying “the overwhelming majority of human beings is this way, so everyone else is just an insignificant outlier;” it implies that non-intersex people are “normal” and there’s something somehow wrong with intersex people, that their bodies are “trying” to be either male or female and they just screwed up somehow. hopefully I don’t need to explain why I find that awful.

well back up. intersex people are outliers. we have two rough groups that make up the vast majority of people, and then a handful that don’t quite fit. that’s what an outlier is.

that doesn’t make them insignificant or unimportant. it just makes them rare.

but again, there’s nothing wrong with being rare; there’s only something wrong with believing that what’s common is what ought to be, a trap that a lot of us fall into. but i can’t get behind redefining rarities to no longer be rare as a solution. it’s disingenuous and doesn’t really fix the problem; it’s more like a marketing trick, and only applies for one particular outlying group at a time.

i guess this is the problem with “normal”: we use it to mean both common and familiar, and then we confuse the two. US public opinion on gay rights has reversed rapidly over the last few years, not because gay people are any less rare, but because tons of people found out they have gay friends or relatives and discovered that gay people are no longer unfamiliar.

this is part of why people from rural areas tend to be the fiercest conservatives: their entire lives they’ve only known people like themselves. so everything else is both rare and unfamiliar, and thus ought not be.

also worth noting that intersex people are capable of exactly the same range of gender identities as non-intersex people, so something is still informing them of a core identity when they haven’t been consistently assigned one socially, or had medical interventions that assigned them a particular gender which they later went on to not identify with despite being socialized that way

i think we have gotten somewhere with this mindmap thing from my last ask

the solution is not to destroy the labels; we’ll just come up with new ones and do the same thing all over again.

I’m not sure why; they’re completely useless and are used as an excuse to misgender trans people. I’ve even had ostensibly trans-friendly medical professionals who knew I was female call me “male” because of how my body developed during puberty, which is very much not okay.

exactly: convince people that they’re useless, not that the specific words are bad. people like labels. we love to categorize things, to find patterns and cling to them. if people avoid the labels but still strongly believe in the groupings, we’re not much better off.

also wow what an asshole of a doctor

the problem is that the labels we have are fundamentally based on a hurtful social construct. people like me want to dismantle that construct. that’s why we have terms like DMAB and DFAB, so we can talk about how people are/have been treated socially without participating in those structures.

sure. labels are always fuzzy; we have them in the first place as shorthand for something broad and common. they always leave something out, and then more specific terms are useful.

but the construct is built on the labels and the categories underlying them. get rid of the labels and people will find something else to prop up the construct. you have to attack the construct itself.

i think, anyway. what the hell do i know about how people behave

our understanding of the brain is so primitive as to be laughable

which isn’t an argument in favor of denying the existence of gender as an innate phenomenon either, and just leaves us back where we started

it’s only an argument that we should be very careful drawing specific preconceived conclusions from something as clumsy as an MRI comparison

huh? people deconvert all the time, sometimes of their own volition, sometimes because something shook their faith, sometimes because they’ve been talked out of it, sometimes because they got around to finally reading their holy texts and had to throw up afterwards. sometimes they’ll go back to their old faith, or another one. and yes, people’s religions can change in abusive situations like the one you described.

oh i know. i was trying to paint a picture of a person who didn’t want to switch religions, but who was being pressured to do so purely by outside forces. i imagine someone who feels very strongly about religion would be far more likely to see the problem as being with everyone else.

poor analogy, i admit. it’s hard to find good ones for this.

in contrast I’ve never heard of a single verifiable instance (besides one from a very long time ago with an extremely disturbed millionaire who transitioned in the wake of a traumatic life event) when a trans person decided they just weren’t trans anymore, and where detransitioning occurs, it’s mainly among people who were already marginalized by society for whom transitioning and surviving just wasn’t feasible.

this isn’t news, but still genuinely surprises me. not that i remotely believe anyone decides to be trans, but the brain is a very flexible organ, and i would expect that at least occasionally it would notice it’s really bumming its owner out and adjust itself accordingly.

or maybe it’s just that if that happens at all, it happens at a young age and the person never remembers feeling dysphoric at all.

brain is fascinating. wish we understood it a little more.