i always say that a Gender Reveal Party can’t really happen until the kid is like 16 years old. the thing people are currently doing would more accurately be called a Baby Sex Party.
Please don’t tell trump or elon
Oh boy, what a name xD It is very accurate and to the point tho. Perfectly highlights how fucking weird it is.
Then technically these should be renamed to “Genital Reveal Parties” but that would imply a different type of party…
in some cases the evidence of “gender” is inferred based on a blood test (the popular commercial tests I know of just looks for the presence of Y chromosome in the mother’s blood and infers the baby is male if so, and if not that the baby is female), so people who throw a party based on a blood test would be throwing a “presence of Y chromosome” party …
“Sex reveal party”. No, that sounds bad, too. “Assigned sex at birth reveal party”. You know what? Maybe we shouldn’t make such a big deal about what sex someone is born as and let them tell us who they are as they figure it out.
We should just have a 2nd trimester party or something so the parents get to celebrate at around the same time
amen
“Child genital information session.”
This is my people. By that, I mean “nerdy leftists who are pretty self-aware in their absurdity, but it can be very hard to tell from the outside, so they are often very cringe to people who aren’t of the same story”. It’s silly, and I love it
gender reveal parties, but a pendant shows up and explains it’s meant to be a sex reveal party, but due to the more risque use of the word sex, and the ambigious uses of the word gender, communication about the motive of such things are difficult, and a feeding ground for pendants, people who have been marginalised, and oppressors.
I also don’t know where I’m going with this. I’m not sure what my next task should be and I’m letting my mind percolate.
Genital reveal party
It really is a genital reveal party… Never thought about it that way. Thanks!
Was it an opal pendant, or perhaps a cameo?
Also, I prefer French press over percolate.
The time of the French press has passed. It’s time for the percolator ( 16 years ago anyway).
Pedant here, use an Oxford comma.
oxford deez nuts.
fixed it anyway.
Ambiguous usage of the word is one of the reasons oppressors have such outdated and undereducated views. The less ambiguity the easier it can be explained to the common folk.
The fun bit is that the word gender was pulled from linguistics into sociology exactly to try to make a less ambiguous situation.
It literally went "what if we talked about people having gender like the French talk about objects?” Much like people, a table is feminine in French regardless of if it has a penis or not.
Later, people decided to use gender as a synonym for sex and complain about using the word gender in a way that’s ambiguous with sex.
I’m glad we never took the word “gender” into swedish, we’ve had to go the opposite way round and start with “sex” and now creating “sex identity” which, like, actually makes sense???
a table is feminine in French regardless of if it has a penis or not.
Which most tables in France do, of course.
Gender has been conflated with human sex from the fifteenth century, but I like your explanation of the sociological application.
Who invited the streaker to the gender reveal party?
Me. The last one was boring. And the one before that started a huge fire. Figured nudity was safer.
Gender reveal party is a social construct.
Shit didn’t even exist until like 10 years ago from my perspective.
shit still doesn’t exist outside of america as far as i can tell, it’s one of those things that are hilariously predicable which people in sweden will start doing it: rich stockholmers with more money than sense whose lives seem to revolve around american media and NOTHING else
From seeing them in the news. The main genders seem to be forest fire and polluted river.
deleted by creator
Have more gender repeal parties. You’re all free of gender. Now let’s fuck.
I always found it weird, you invite family and friends and then use colours to say “Yaaay, the baby has a penis/vagina!!” and everyone cheers no matter what it is, so it just feels empty. It’s like the people who comment the disgustingly spammed identical crap on every youtube video, “wake up babe, blabla dropped a new video!!” and then get hundreds of likes. It’s all so fucking soulless and disturbing.
When I had my kids, my wife and I would play a game where if someone asked the gender of the baby, we’d pick opposite sides.
Like a stranger would ask and my wife would go, “Ah yeah it’ll be a boy.” And id shout with excitement while my wife starts crying. Or I’d go, “No not another alpha in the house!” While my wife is laughing maniacally and making the “slice your neck” motion.
It always make them feel weird.
Good.
Second anthropology professor appears, chastising the first one for being so ethnocentric.
Only if the professor comes out of the cake like a stripper
Saying gender is binary is like saying there are only two types of apples, red and green.
because you mention apples i’m physically forced to share this trivia; There are two types of apple: Regular ones, and dessert ones. We’re used to dessert apples, ones that are sweet enough to just take a bite out of. For most of history we only really had normal apples, which taste like shit and are basically only usable for cider and using in cooking.
There are two types of apples, red apples and non-red apples. D’ya see? Everything in the universe either is a banana or it is not, all is binary.
Quantum physics would like a word
just fyi that’s kinda the worst comparison you can make: The whole point of quantum physics is that it revolves around quanta, discrete states with no continuum between them. Best case it implies that there are a lot of genders, but it still implies each gender is its own distinct thing completely different from the other ones.
Quantum physics doesn’t exist, it is invented by physics professors to sell you more quants
Something is in a quantum superposition state or it isn’t, absolute binariness.
chess/similar games/sports :
Women
Open
I don’t think I quite understand…
There are two types of apples, red apples and non-red apples.
Is what the other person said. Paralels happen in certain game/sport categorizations, with women being a defined grouping, and all else (including women) being put into the open/other category.
Are they really having a “womans chess competition”? that sounds like a joke…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Blitz_Chess_Championship_2024
nope.
The goal is to improve the women’s experience and make it more feasable as a career choice for the best women. Sometimes it gets controversial, even among women, but it’s a noble idea until women and men are evenly represented in top tournaments.
Notable female players that reached near the level of the top men include Judit Polgar (Peak ranking : 8th worldwide) and Hou Yifan (Peak ranking 55th worldwide).
There is no physical gender/sex/whatever based reason why women underperform compared to men, so until societal/environmental factors change, trying to enable more women to reach higher levels with incentives seems good. They are not barred from the open category (which people mistakenly call “mens’” sometimes) , so they can choose which tourney they attend. Some “open” (I’ve now realised open can have two meanings, I am only referring to tourneys that can be played by any gender, not the opposite of invite based) tourneys even make a point to request the female world champ participate.
I’ve written lots about this in the past, but don’t have much time now
There are two types of apples: Red Delicious and edible
Perfect, case closed.
I see you have never read the definitive apple ranking site and the Rome Apple review.
Do people feel like you can’t say if it’s a girl or a boy before they’re old enough to express some preference? That seems to be the thing people pick on with gender reveal parties but that doesn’t really make sense to me if you’re cool with “It’s a girl. We’re going to name her Alice.” without the party. It’s not like the party is usually hyper fixated on gender roles. You cut some cake or pop some balloons during a pretty normal family party. Sex chromosomes/genitals are one of the only unique things you really learn about the baby before they’re here that isn’t generally considered bad news. I guess we could have height percentile parties?
The problem is that if you do away with gender roles, then a gender reveal party turns into a baby vagina/penis reveal party. It’s a creepy concept that is only normalized because of society’s hyper fixation on gender roles and we should just get rid of it.
Very often at this point, expectant parents are basing it on the presence of a Y chromosome or not, not on genitals. Does that take the creepiness out for you?
Do you have a problem with them disclosing the gender of their children at all?
They’re not disclosing the gender of their children. They also don’t take a blood test to find out the chromoses, they literally have a doctor look at the baby’s crotch with an ultrasound and throw a party based on what they see.
People do often take a blood test on Mom which will include some fraction of fetal DNA. They can do a blood test where they just check if there’s any Y chromosome (sneak peek) or they can take a blood test which is to check for chromosomal abnormalities which also happens to tell you the sex chromosomes (NIPT). These happen much earlier than you can tell via looking at genitals on ultrasound and is increasingly becoming how people find out the sex of their baby.
People very often say they are having a girl or a boy and give them a gendered name. Do you have an issue with that?
I might guess with such a party you really reinforce everyone’s image of the baby’s sex and they might be less accepting if the person comes out as a different gender further down the line? Idk
Doesn’t really matter. The moment the people hear it’s male or female, determines how people will treat the baby. Put a baby boy in pink and don’t tell people, and people will talk to him like they would to a girl.
Whether or not people accept the small chance that the kid turns out transgender, depends on their personal views. I doubt a gebder reveal party is significant. Besides, it’s a party for the parents to be. Not the baby.
I absolutely get that, but I thought, perhaps making such a big deal out of the baby’s sex might set some large expectations pretty early on. Not only in the parents’ minds, but all the family that attends.
Those expectatioms will be there regardless and depend largly on the culture and people. A gender reveal won’t add much I think.
i mean it’s certainly going to be a bit of a bummer if they end up wanting to transition, kinda like how it sucks to be branded as “gifted” in school and then falling behind and unable to get a job.
You know what it’ll be yet?
Yes, they’ll be a wage slave.
What’s the point of a gender reveal party if not an excuse to use high explosives? There’s no fun if something isn’t being blown up in some way or form.
if you need an excuse to use high explosives you need to rethink your life
Let them organize their own gender reveal party when they are old enough to decide
Gender identity is biological, and gender is not only a social construct:
https://www.advocate.com/politics/transgender/2013/10/07/book-excerpt-gender-more-performance
EDIT: this is clarified in the walls of text in my responses below, but to be clear here, I do not endorse a biological essentialist account of gender, by saying gender is not only a social construct and has biological components, I am disagreeing with a view that gender is just socialization / performance / etc., but this does not mean I endorse the view that gender is just your chromosomes / genitals / etc. Neither of these views work.
Please read the article I linked to, and for additional reading see Whipping Girl by Julia Serano, esp. relevant to this discussion is chapter 6, some of which I quoted in my responses below.
When I say gender identity is biological, I am talking about what Julia Serano calls “subconscious sex” which she also sometimes interchanges with “gender identity”, which is basically that innate and unchanging sense of your sex / gender. What I don’t mean by gender identity is the label you choose to identify with (or the concept that label represents).
From Whipping Girl:
the phrase “gender identity” is problematic because it seems to describe two potentially different things: the gender we consciously choose to identify as, and the gender we subconsciously feel ourselves to be. To make things clearer, I will refer to the latter as subconscious sex.
Thank you for trying to give a well documented take on the effects of biological sex on gender identity on Lemmy lol
lol, thanks - hopefully I’m actually helping, I feel so far like I’m just pissing people off
Results: Evidence that there is a biologic basis for gender identity primarily involves (1) data on gender identity in patients with disorders of sex development (DSDs, also known as differences of sex development) along with (2) neuroanatomical differences associated with gender identity.
Conclusions: Although the mechanisms remain to be determined, there is strong support in the literature for a biologic basis of gender identity.
That’s not saying what you seem to be implying, and it’s not contrary to what people mean when they say gender is a social construct.
Saying gender expression is not only performance is not really related to gender being a social construct.What we define the genders to be is what is a social construct. The masculine gender encompasses a wide array of behaviours and expressions, as does the feminine. The behaviours and attitudes we assign to each gender is what’s socially constructed. People tend to have a gender identity that matches their biological sex, and through acculturation we teach them the behaviors associated with each gender in our culture. Some people later realize that they’re most comfortable conforming to a different gender than what matches their sex.
I agree with you that the “gender is a social construct” is ultimately an ontological claim, about what gender is. When I hear “gender is just a social construct”, especially from an anthropologist, I am entirely expecting a social constructionist account of gender, that’s what they are communicating - what gender is.
Clearly there are social elements to gender, like the color we associate with a gender, which has changed over time and is arbitrary. There is nothing intrinsic about gender-color associations, no reason “blue” means “boy” and “pink” means “girl”.
Regarding gender expression not only being performance: some people use Butler’s performative theory of gender as a social constructionist account of gender. It’s not really a coincidence in my mind that Butler shares some intellectual roots with the psychoanalytical sexologists who popularized social constructionist views in the 1960s, so while I’m sure you could parse several social constructionist accounts I don’t think it’s unfair to lump them together as a broad camp. The Julia Serano article I linked even does this:
Look, I know that many contemporary queer folks and feminists embrace mantras like “all gender is performance,” “all gender is drag,” and “gender is just a construct.” They seem empowered by the way these sayings give the impression that gender is merely a fiction. A facade. A figment of our imaginations.
Notice how she lumps together views like “all gender is performance” and “gender is just a construct”. I think this article is a relevant response to “gender is a social construct”.
And yes, it depends somewhat on what people actually mean when they say “gender is a social construct”, but I generally take them to mean that they believe in a social constructionist account of gender, i.e. that gender is entirely arbitrary, the result of how we are raised, and the result of socialization. If you are raised a boy, you are a boy because of how you were raised.
The idea that gender identity is biological, which is what that Safer meta-analysis concludes, contradicts the social constructionist account because it claims that a person’s gender is intrinsic to them in some way, for example you can’t just take a boy and raise them as a girl without problems (as the case of David Reimer illustrates, when the sexologist, John Money, who believed gender was just a construct and tested that theory by trying to have a boy raised as a girl).
You’re putting far too much thought into what other people mean by the phrase, particularly in the context of a joke.
Most people are not referring to several different anthropological, sociological, and feminist theories/philosophies.When you disagree with “gender is a social construct” in a casual setting, intentionally or not, you’re conveying the statement “gender is innately tied to biological sex, there are precisely two, and trans people are invalid”.
It’s better to take the phrase as meaning “having a vagina doesn’t mean you’re a hot pink wearing pretty princess, nor does a penis imply you aren’t. Gender is more complicated than a binary, and we’re better off raising children as little people who tell us who they are than spending too much time being concerned that they only play with plastic figurines compatible with their genitals and playacting the right chores”.
It’s a joke about tricking people into attending an event usually focused on baby genitals, and then instead giving them cake that isn’t coded to the babies genitals with a lecture about how they don’t tell you as much about who this little person will be as people think.
When you disagree with “gender is a social construct” in a casual setting, intentionally or not, you’re conveying the statement “gender is innately tied to biological sex, there are precisely two, and trans people are invalid”.
Wild to see such a binary view on this given the context. How can this be taken to be any less constraining (to someonen who views gender as a spectrum) than the view that “there are only two biological genders”?
Dandelion is giving examples on how it is not necessarily a social construct and providing examples and sources. That portions of gender have a propensity to be tied to biological sex.
I think there’s a conflation of terms here. There’s Big G Gender, and little g individual-gender-identity.
Genders are social constructs. “Girls like pink and ponies” is not tied to anything except culture.
Your gender identity however, is absolutely not a social construct. Otherwise people wouldn’t be raised as one gender, live that way for decades and then figure out that the reason things have felt “wrong” is because they’ve been living a gender that doesn’t fit.The given examples were about gender identity, how that’s correlated with biology, and how it’s more than just how you present yourself to the world.
Conflating Gender and gender identity can lead to a lot of confusion.
My comment was more toward the first influencing an individuals relationship with the second if that makes sense.
I agree, I am taking this way out of the original context, but I think the joke is maybe a straw breaking the camel’s back here. I think Julia Serano’s article communicates this well enough:
If one more person tells me that “all gender is performance” I think I am going to strangle them. What’s most annoying about that sound-bite is how it is often recited in a somewhat snooty “I-took-a-gender-studies-class-and-you-didn’t” sort of way, which is ironic given the way that phrase dumbs down gender. It is a crass oversimplification that is as ridiculous as saying all gender is genitals, all gender is chromosomes, or all gender is socialization.
She’s frustrated, I’m frustrated. There is frustration that is generated by the “gender is just a social construct”. The joke is literally about how the dumb cis people really just need an hour long lecture from an academic on how gender is actually just a social construct. I can’t think of a better example of this condescending and ironically confidently-incorrect attitude.
Maybe I think too much, but I guess my whole point is that people are not thinking enough. When they say gender is just a social construct they may not be familiar with gender theory or understand the nuances, and maybe stamping out biological essentialism is worth the oversimplifying, but there is something that feels wrong to me about penalizing a trans person challenging a view that invalidates their gender as an arbitrary fiction. I understand the intentions are not to be invalidating, and that most people don’t understand the consequences of social constructionism, but that’s exactly why I’m raising the problems and challenging it.
To your point I could have done a much better job to not be confused with taking a biological essentialist view, but I think anyone who actually parses what I said and reads the articles I linked to will understand I am not endorsing biological essentialism. Still, that maybe is too high of a bar, and it would have been better if I did more to anticipate this knee-jerk reaction to my challenge. It’s always good to make sure you are easy to understand, and this is admittedly a mea culpa because I was rushing and didn’t have much time, so I wrote a much shorter comment and linked to articles to cover the extra ground for me (which was clearly not adequate).
I don’t know what to make of your claim that I shouldn’t interpret “gender is just a social construct” as supporting social constructionism … there is something compelling here about what people are trying to convey is more rooted in their intentions than any kind of theory, like a lot of times when people tell me “gender is just a social construct” it’s because they are trying to signal they are trans-accepting. That said, I don’t think there is any consistent or coherent view that we could really point to then, that is I’m not sure we could say “gender is just a social construct” actually communicates “the gender binary is not valid”, for example, because some people will take the social constructionism more seriously than others, some people use it to actually mean, “I think trans people are valid”, and others use it to mean “I will tolerate you as a trans person”, and others still might use it to mean “you are dumb and don’t understand gender, but I went to school and in my anthropology class we talked about how gender is cultural and sex is biological, blah blah blah”.
In summary, maybe you’re right that I am inappropriately hijacking this joke to attack social constructionism, but I still don’t think it’s that crazy that I thought “gender is a social construct” was espousing some form of social constructionism.
Thanks for putting up with me and reading my responses, and for challenging me - you have some compelling points that I should think about more.
I get that it can be frustrating to know a deeper and more nuanced definition of a thing and come up against people using a simpler, different or “hijacked” definition: I work in computer security and enjoy playing with machine learning. Most people get a very different impression if I say I do a lot of stuff with crypto and AI from what I mean. They hear finance bro and wasteful chatbots, and I mean user authentication, privacy and statistics.
A big point of friction I see is that it seems you’re reading the words people say, interpreting them as though they’re coming from the same background as you, and then responding in their terms.
If one more person tells me that “all gender is performance”
There is frustration that is generated by the “gender is just a social construct”.
hour long lecture from an academic on how gender is actually just a social construct
The “performance” and “just” a social construct interpretations are what you’re bringing, not the person typing.
Being told gender, that you had to struggle to find a way to make right, is reducible to how you were socialized or choose to act flies in the face of the existence of trans people and the difficulties they invariably have and is justifiably infuriating.
That the message is being given by people who very clearly, in both intent and action, believe the exact opposite should make it clear that there’s a dictionary mismatch somewhere.
I feel like it stems from the belief that “social construct” implies “social constructionism”.
Social constructionism is a specific theory involving social constructs , and acknowledging the existence of a social construct doesn’t imply acceptance of that theory.I don’t think any reasonable person would argue that law is anything other than real by fiat of convention or collective agreement, but someone could easily disagree with the notion that scientific discovery is more about social convention than empirical reality.
Most people mean it in the sense that the WHO means it: https://www.who.int/health-topics/gender#tab=tab_1
I agree that the central problem here is that when the WHO or others refer to gender as a social construct, that it implies a social constructionist account of gender. However, I don’t see another interpretation that makes much sense. I do precisely think that people can have intentions opposite of the content of their statement, like if a person wanted to reassure a racial minority by telling them that they don’t even see race - it sounds supportive, but it communicates a racial eliminativist stance that undermines attempts at justice and repair. Sure, the well-meaning person may not be versed on the nuances of racial eliminativism vs racial constructivism, but it doesn’t mean the sentiment isn’t still problematic, or that the racial minority is just not understanding the interaction and there must be a mismatch somewhere.
I think the mismatch is between the view being espoused and that person’s understanding of the view. Sure, I might smile and nod trying to not soil the interaction, but I don’t think the problem is that actually I am mistaken and they aren’t communicating a social constructionist account of gender …
Also, the WHO article does communicate a social constructionist view of gender, and uses the typical gender/sex distinction on the typical basis that gender is social and sex is biological:
Gender refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed. This includes norms, behaviours and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl or boy, as well as relationships with each other. As a social construct, gender varies from society to society and can change over time.
Gender interacts with but is different from sex, which refers to the different biological and physiological characteristics of females, males and intersex persons, such as chromosomes, hormones and reproductive organs.
This distinction doesn’t hold up, as sex is more socially constructed than is acknowledged here, and gender has more of a biological basis than is acknowledged. It is just inaccurate and out of sync with current evidence, as far as I can tell.
Besides the readings I have suggested, another resource covering some of this territory is this lecture:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZymYiwoRoC0
The chapter around 26 minutes in covers why the sex/gender distinction falls apart.
I don’t think that reading of the who page tracks, and I kinda struggle to see how you got what you did from it.
Gender [categories] refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed.
Gender interacts with but is different from sex
Gender and sex are related to but different from gender identity.
Gender identity refers to a person’s deeply felt, internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond to the person’s physiology or designated sex at birth.
(As an aside, I feel like picking on an overview that explicitly acknowledges intersex individuals for not addressing the social construction of sex, while simultaneously being critical of it for addressing the social construction of gender is a bit nit-picky)
I really feel like there’s this persistent conflation of gender categories and gender identity in your interpretation of what others are expressing, and an insistence that talking about social constructs is an endorsement of social constructionism as a whole.
It seems like we agree that the roles and attitudes we ascribe to gender categories are not objective, but socially constructed.
“Gender” is regularly used to refer to both the category and the individuals identity as being to some degree a member of that category, and it’s expected that people know which is being referred to by context.In your example involving race, I don’t think that’s a good comparison. In your example the person is saying words that generally minimize the importance of race while attempting to convey that they’re not prejudiced. Critically, everyone agrees to what the words are referring to.
In the “gender is a social construct” case, I don’t think there’s agreement about what the word “gender” is referring to. The speaker means gender category, and the listener keeps understanding it as gender identity.It’s like if someone says “gender isn’t a social construct” and I keep hearing them imply “women are naturally more differential and domestic, and men more forceful and outdoorsy”, even once they explain they meant an individuals identity is more than social convention.
When I say gender identity is biological, I am talking about what Julia Serano calls “subconscious sex” which she also sometimes interchanges with “gender identity”, which is basically that innate and unchanging sense of your sex / gender.
Okay, but what about those of us that have never had an innate and unchanging sense of my sex/gender?
The closer you look at these things the more complicated they become. What we seem to know from the science is that:
- the brain is not entirely neutral, there are sexual traits,
- the sexual brain traits cannot be easily categorized into two boxes like “male” or “female”, but are more like a constellation or mosaic of traits all in different configurations with very few brains fitting a category like “male” or “female”, and
- trans women seem to share overlapping sexual brain traits with cis women, and it seems like this is true of trans men as well.
The science is just the current body of evidence we have, so we should expect our understanding to evolve as our evidence grows.
To more directly answer your question requires some clarification. It is unclear whether you’re asking how subconscious sex relates to agender people (no sense of gender), or to gender fluid people (a changing sense), or detransitioners (sometimes changing sense), or even just any normal person, since none of us has that kind of direct access to our subconscious sex, it is implicit. If we could inspect it directly it would certainly make the whole “am I trans” or “am I a woman” question much easier, wouldn’t it? Maybe someday we will have the technology, or maybe we will find that our concept of “woman” simply cannot be mapped to a complex biological trait like brain sex.
Subconscious sex is inferred, gender dysphoria and innate behavioral drives seem to give us footprints from which we can infer that subconscious sex from. Being a man and feeling the desire to wear a dress and skirt, how does he make sense of this? Maybe he assumes it’s a fetish, but what if they enjoy it outside of sex, and maybe the sex when dressing up brings up so many complicated feelings (later she learns: dysphoric, even). Can it still be a fetish, can you be a crossdresser if you just want to wear a skirt around the house, but you have trouble extracting sexual pleasure from it? These are the kinds of investigating thoughts, the attempt to read between the lines. Some people might live their whole lives and never know their subconscious sex, they might successfully put off dealing with dysphoria or taking their crossdressing further. Some people have strong convictions from a young age and just know without as much ambiguity. There is quite a variety, just as the complex biology would imply.
It is also worth noting that it is a complicated relationship between something like subconscious sex or an innate brain sex and something like a self conception of one’s gender. I certainly experience fluctuations in my self conception and even my felt sense of gender. Testosterone can make it much harder for me to feel like a woman. Moving through the world as a woman and being seen and treated as one by others creates a social circumstance that bolsters a psychological self conception as a woman. Neither of these things directly tell me my subconscious sex, but when the testosterone makes me feel awful, or when being treated and seen as a woman makes me feel wonderful, or when estrogen gives me mild waves of buzzing bodily euphoric, I make inferences about my subconscious sex from that.
So I don’t know what you mean, but hopefully I have covered some of the ground you had in mind.
So, I’m afab and probably agender, which is where the confusion is coming from. I’m on estrogen and progesterone because otherwise my cycle is stuck to ‘on’, so even my relationship with hormones is complicated.
Neither of these things directly tell me my subconscious sex, but when the testosterone makes me feel awful, or when being treated and seen as a woman makes me feel wonderful, or when estrogen gives me mild waves of buzzing bodily euphoric, I make inferences about my subconscious sex from that.
See, none of that resonates with me at all. Going off my meds makes me feel terrible, but that’s from the resulting anemia. I’ve tried living as a man, I’ve tried living as a woman, I’ve never gotten that “yes, this is me” feeling that people talk about. I don’t know what “psychological self conceptualization” as a gender means, because it’s all uncomfortable for me?
It feels like what you’re talking about is the university course and I’m still in primary education.
Sure, you have to realize - I spent several decades never questioning my gender and living as a man, and I certainly could have gone the rest of my life that way. It took a lot of change for me to even recognize the experiences I had were even gendered. You may actually lack the hermeneutical tools to interpret and understand your gendered experience, but it sounds like “agender” is already giving you a foothold. Feeling alienated from both genders is a thing that tells you “this is me”. The evidence from the brain scans about subconscious sex shows that most people are going to not evenly fall into two camps like male and female, so why is it surprising that you wouldn’t feel at home in either?
What I mean about psychological self-conceptualization of my gender: when I dream, my brain sometimes generates a “me” that moves around and does things, interacts and experiences in the dream, etc. That “me” has a gender! I think of myself as a certain way, and it determines how I interact with other people, and how they interact with me. When I am stuck thinking of myself as a man, even when I feel dysphoria from being a man, it can be distressing - but I don’t have direct control over my self-conceptualization. It’s like a habituated way of thinking about myself.
Sometimes in my dreams I will be interacting as a man, and then a sudden shift in my gender happens as I interact with a male stranger for example, shaking his hand I become aware of my breasts and suddenly I’m interacting with him as though I were a woman. It is a bizarre experience for me, and most of my life I never thought about my self conceptualization at all. Of course, the self concept is not just in dreams, and when I started voice therapy I realized my self-concept influenced how my voice sounded, and that I had to tackle habituating a voice partially by habituating conceiving of myself as a woman, by reminding myself over and over that I look like a woman and I need to navigate the world as a woman.
You probably have a self-conceptualization as a woman to some extent, you probably have to for pragmatic reasons. I think socialization can play a big role in that psychology, the ways we acculturate and learn how to interact according to the gendered roles. To not do so is generally not adaptive and creates friction, for example I am learning that my habit from living as a man of holding doors open for everyone is starting to backfire as I learn that men would rather die than have a woman hold a door open for them. I am violating social norms when I hold doors open, and they rush forward to take over holding the door I’m trying to hold open for them.
The socialization is still separate from the self-conceptualization, but I think they can be related in terms of the self-concept tapping into those social roles we have learned.
Good luck exploring your gender!
