Gender
Alright, I've posted a similar (possibly indentical) topic before but that was months ago.
But it's a subject that comes up again and again in these journals. So what does 'gender' mean to you?
I'm a bit allergic to the word, if I'm honest. I try to read something serious about gender and I can feel facial expression turning into the one my father has when anyone other than him talks about anything; the Jeremy Clarkson effect, two parts condescension and one part smug.
Judith Butler is staring me down on the shelf above my desk, behind an empty mug of tea. I read bits out to G and B (the siblings) when I want to them to help tidy up, like my mum will make them watch the Welsh channel if they're squabbling.
I am perhaps not the best person to start a serious discussion of 'gender'. But I'll try:
Tell me about your gender.
My take:
I feel sometimes just sick to the stomach, when I remember that almost all art, culture, philosophy, politics and history, most science, most literature is the achievement of men. Almost everything worth recalling.
Sometimes, being a woman makes me feel so distanced from humanity.
I am frightened when I read about biological basis for male and female behavior- you know all the endless pop science and dodgy evolutionary psychology- because I don't think I stand another six millenia of holding the baby.
But the fact that I am irrevocably female is tied to my body and my mind is a part of my body. I am feminine as a result of cultural experience, I am female biologically.
So when people say that they are male or female, but that this identity is exists other than their physical bodies', I don't actually understand what they could be talking about. It's not a matter of transphobia; I'm not denying their experience of gender, I just don't know what they mean. Which is why perhaps some people might be able to help me with their answers here.
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I'm not transexual so I
I'm not transexual so I honestly can't speak from personal experience. But I looked up gender and apparently it is "an individual's self-conception as being male or female." Sex, on the other hand, refers to the individual's biological traits. So I suppose gender really is always ''chosen'' after birth, as soon as the person has a perception of themself/the world around them? Hopefully someone with real insight will answer =].
Well...
Here's how I look at it:
I always thought my biology would eventually conform to what I knew I was in my head. As in, I spent the first 7 years of my life sure I would eventually grow a penis, grow up to be a man, father children, grow a beard and such, and leave the somewhat confusing and temporary state of being a girl behind. It was only later that I realized this wouldn't happen.
Then there was puberty: bleeding, boobs, pimples and all kinds of other horrors. It scared the crap out of me that I was becoming a woman (in the physical sense) not because I didn't like women, but because it was something so foreign that it was like discovering you're growing up to be a camel. So the beginning of my adolescence was full of "What the hell?" moments where I was confused by my biology's rebellion against my mental maleness.
Actually, mental maleness isn't quite the right way to say it, in that it's not so much that my mind is male and my body is female, it's more that everything that went into my being is male except for the biological aspects that result in things like boobs and a vagina. I'm not sure that made sense.
I guess the simplest way to explain it is that I'm just a guy with some odd quirks of biology that changed my body, but not my brain. I don't know. Best answer I've got.
Hope that helped some.
Do I shock you darling?
-Sally Bowles, Cabaret
Hmm...
Pimples is a female thing? Who knew?
---
"Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment." - Rumi
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Heh.
I didn't mean that. I was going for "general horrors of puberty" rather than "exclusively female horrors of puberty".
Do I shock you darling?
-Sally Bowles, Cabaret
I'm gonna just try to
I'm gonna just try to explain what I can... I'll warn you in advance though I'm not so good with words. 0w0;
Where to start? Umm...
For starters, I feel incredibly uncomfortable in my body. This has nothing to do with culture or any of that. But my body just feels wrong somehow. For example, I refuse to go swimming because either I'll have to wear a horrible bathing suit or even if I wore shorts and a t-shirt, the shirt would still cling, and people would still see that I'm a girl. And once my friend got pictures of me in a tank-top looking like a girl, and I actually started crying because she wouldn't delete them. (she did after I cried though.)
And, I want the world to see me as a boy, because that's what I am. Even though my body doesn't fit that. I'm not even that masculine, personality wise. But me as a girl, just feels so wrong I can't really explain it. But yeah... Told you, bad with words. I'm not sure how to describe what I'm going through. But it's not like I consciously decided, "okay, I want to be a boy" I've always BEEN a boy, I just haven't fully realized it until recently.
i dont identify with either
i dont identify with either sexes...i mean i know biogically im a girl but in the inside its the complete opposite, i like to wear make up like a girl but i style my hair and dress like a boy. so i juss kinda consider myself genderqueer which is a combination of both sexes
it sounds crazy but it feels right...
..
Well.. Like Riku, I don't like to go swimming because people would figure out that I'm a girl.
But I don't see myself as male or female, I'm something in between.
I have a friend who calls me "cute" just to make me mad. When we're out and about, she corrects people who call me "sir."
I don't want to phisically change my body, I just want to be recognised as somthing that is neither sex.
Blah! I suck at words..
maybe yer genderqueer
maybe yer genderqueer
THE CONCEPT OF GENDER REPULSES ME
I don't have one. I just do what I wanna do, and the hell with stereotypes and expectations. I like not wasting my time trying to fit into the mold. Who do I have to impress or inconvenience myself for?