graffiti rule

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"A will be B, B will be A."
Either A and B don't mean anything 'strict' or they mean something and that doesn't make sense. But we should all be against fascism, ofc!
- I read it like some boys will be girls and some girls will be boys, not all boys and all girls.
- It's a line from The Kinks' Lola.
  The first bit, not the bit about fascists. But I suspect they'd be on board with that.
- Let's just say that A and B exist on a continuum and it makes things easier for everyone if we blur the lines a little more
  
  I'm somewhat in agreement with this, but I don't know if we can actually pass the thresholds with superficial physical changes enough to go from A to B. Regardless, it's easy for me to talk about because I don't struggle with gender dysphoria, so I don't really discuss this IRL (or much online either tbh) and just try to "play along" cause they have it hard as it is.
  
  The thing is there is no line, no threshold. Sex/gender consist of many aspects, none of them is a binary and they are more intertwined than you would think.
  Let's start with appearance. Body size is two overlapping bell curves (as in the other comment to my first comment). Same is voice pitch, muscle mass, testosterone levels, ...
  For organs, there are intersex people and some trans people on stages of transition. Chromosomes: ever met a XXY man or a X0 woman? And it's not really about the chromosome but a gene on the Y chromosome (SRY) that in rare occasions gets on the X chromosome or is damaged all together.
  Do boys prefer boys activities because of their testosterone level or because they are taught to? Is the muscle mass due to the testosterone or due to the "boy sports" they do?
  And that doesn't mean that genders don't exist. There are prototypes of what a woman is but no one embodies them, many tho are close enough to self identity as a woman or man and this can change during one's life. There are other categorizations such as "read as female/male", "assigned at birth", "socialized as ...", (non-)mentruating, .... Some folks claim that this attempt takes away analytic categories while in fact, it adds new ones that are important in different contexts.
  So it's not a threshold but separated steps. You can do activities associated with the genders you weren't assigned as and broaden the understanding of what a (wo)man can do. You can also identity as and later hormonally transition to. It's up to you. There is no binary. There never was. Everyone is somewhere in between but many are close enough to one side to embrace it.
  
  I don't give much credence to the word "gender" and their norms simply follow from sexual dimorphism in my understanding. I don't think the vast majority of human beings need to "embrace" their sex either, they simply are, much like the rest of mammals. Humans are more complex but why "gendrify" some slight variations in personality traits? Some things simply come more naturally to one sex and not the other because of it, and their "competence" is not a marking of "gender fluidity" but development/maturity (which can be affected by many things, like trauma and ideology, because again human beings are complex), or simply variance within parameters. My "somehow" was more about stuff that you mentioned like intersex folks, Klinefelter, etc., which as you probably know affects the tiniest minority of human beings, and also the possibility that a person's brain might have been fundamentally altered because of something not going as expected in the development process. Should we consider those with Down's syndrome, for instance, another "viable" category of human being or understand it, as we do, as something that happens simply because 'shit happens' through growth, because mechanical processes can sometimes go tits up? You can modify parts of you either superficially or more deeply through hormonal changes thanks to current technology but that doesn't mean you ARE, just that you sought changes and you got them (was MJ a white man?). People also conflate sexual attraction with "sexual identity", which is unnecessary and just doesn't follow, which is why we have LGBT and aren't just separate categories. Also, that muscle mass argument is just wrong, come on now, friend. I think many just get lost in words too, and that gives credence to their feelings to a certain degree (and in certain communities, it is even encouraged) and as such will just go entirely in that direction, looking to force changes (is it not possible to be a sensitive, homosexual man without necessarily having to consider yourself a woman, for example? I personally know two, just saying). And it's not a reason to hate people or anything even close to it, of course, but that's another conversation (that should be short and with obvious conclusions).
  Anyway, I hope this comment was understood with the same civility and respect I tried to phrase it in, and I admit it the subject might be more complex than my current understanding of it and that it might be flawed. I understand it's an emotionally difficult conversation to have, and more so for those who are the topic of the conversation. Peace!

17 comments