How would you put into words what gender means to you apart from societal gender roles and expectations?

I know that it has significant meaning to me but I struggle putting it into words to explain it to other people (especially other dya cis people). So like a few years ago I was thinking about if I may be trans femme. I have since realised that no, actually I was just struggling with it for a while because I don’t relate to the gender roles and expectations society puts on men. I now identify more strongly with being a man than ever before, and I love being a man in a gender-way. I just absolutely hate being a man in a “what role men have in society”-way.

Poggervania,
Poggervania avatar

Similar to another poster, I break it down like this:

  • Sex is your physical binary biological gender. If you have a penis and testicles that produce sperm, you are a dude; if you have a vagina, ovaries, and a womb to carry a baby, you are a female. No ifs, ands, or buts about this imo.

  • Gender identity is what you identify as. This is where we go he/she/they, and can be completely removed from the biological sex of the person because gender is psychological and belongs to the sense of self. We use “he” and “she” as binary identifiers of male and female species respectively, but with humans it becomes more complex as perhaps a male may identify as a female-gendered person, or a female may identify as a male-gendered person - or both of them identify as a non-gendered person.

  • Gender roles could (and I personally think should) be separated from both biological sex and psychological gender. This is what we, as human society as a whole, determine the division of labor and what activities, habits, and behaviors are acceptable for men and women. In the past when we were still growing as a species, this was actually important since men were needed to hunt down animals due to biologically being more suited to it and women were needed to do other things while the men were out; nowadays, however, this is a dated concept as anybody can earn money and we don’t live in a world where we need to hunt to survive. Women can just as easily put food on the table and enjoy riding motorcycles or chopping down wood just as easily as men could stay at home, clean the house, take care of the kids, and cook meals for the family for when their partner gets home. If anything, I would say that we could consider the “Masculine/Feminine” dichotomy as a sliding scale at best, but what society considers “masculine” or “feminine” changes all the time, so it’s arguably ultimately worthless trying to categorize this.

TL;DR Biological sex, gender identity, and gender role aren’t all mutually inclusive. If I am a man, I am not beholden to the expectations of being a macho man who slams IPAs and lifts weights while talking about cars; on the flip side, if I am a man who identifies as a female, I am also not beholden to obtaining a Blåhaj shark plushie, wearing kneesocks all the time, losing 60 pounds, and becoming a software engineer who only runs Arch or some other Linux distro.

Maven,
@Maven@lemmy.world avatar

It’s worth noting that humans do not come in a sex binary. Intersex is a lot more common than people think it is, just often in ways that are invisible. I know 3 intersex people personally that are all intersex in different ways. None of them would fall into either “binary” category.

Edit: To add to this, what about people with testicles that CANT produce sperm? Or people with a vagina but have had to have their womb removed due to a medical complication? These also don’t fall under either definition given. Oftentimes rigid systems are only good for excluding people even if that isn’t the intention.

Cryophilia,

Even if it’s twice as common as most scientific studies believe it is, it’s still less than a tenth of a percent of the population.

The fact that you know 3 intersex people says more about the company you choose to keep than it does about the prevalence in the average population.

Intersex people are important to keep in mind but we also need context here. Statistically, they’re not a 3rd gender, they’re a rounding error. They exist, but it’s disingenuous to say something like “AHA, but you have failed to consider the tiny percentage of people who do not fit into your description!”

I think it’s fair to say something like “sex is binary” in the same way it’s fair to say something like “dogs have four legs”. Yes there are dogs with 3 legs, but if we had to include every statistical rounding error every time we talked about something we’d never be able to say anything. Given the topic, I think Poggervania should have at least included a mention of intersex people, but let’s not pretend that the world is split equally into male, female, and intersex.

If this bothers you, I challenge you to pick any noun and describe it. Literally any physical thing. Describe it to the best of your ability. I’ll find something that you didn’t include in your description.

Maven,
@Maven@lemmy.world avatar

I simply don’t care about the rest of the argument. It is disgusting to call millions of people a rounding error.

Cryophilia,

Reality is often disappointing. But it is real.

Maven,
@Maven@lemmy.world avatar

Reality is, these people exist. Despite your protests they are real. Your argument is based on them either not existing or being a mistake.

There is simply no way we can ever align on this issue if we can’t fundamentally agree that all people are people. Enjoy the rest of your day. I’m not continuing this.

Cryophilia,

Well if you keep pretending I said things I didn’t say, you can get offended at whatever you want. Please leave me out of it though. I didn’t ask to be party to the made up argument in your head.

ReallyKinda,

Just because I’m interested in archeology I thought I would share that evidence supporting a strong division of labour based on sex in ancient societies is pretty thin. There have been several articles lately arguing against that hypothesis due to finding skeletons of women buried with weapons and weapons that appear to be designed for lighter frames.

Poggervania,
Poggervania avatar

Oh sick - I did not know that! That’s really cool actually. Would this be from something like the Smithsonian Museum if I wanted to read up on this kind of stuff?

ReallyKinda,

Here are a couple recent ones:

doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0287101

doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-40451-8

doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abd0310

RBWells,

I am really very attached to being biologically female. Loved being pregnant, nursing, enjoy sex in this body. I would be utterly distressed to wake up in a male body.

Personally, I think of male/female as biological, manly/womanly as things defined by the entire set of people who consider themselves men, or women (like if you are a woman you are by definition womanly) and masculine/feminine as performance - if you were a genderless alien and trying to fit in here, or a man portraying a woman in a comedy, the things you would do to perform gender - clothing and behaviors that are more superficial.

I think probably the last two are gender. And yes you can be manly as fuck without being masculine. Perhaps more manly, because you don’t feel you need to perform masculinity to be a man.

kava,

Well, what does “being a man” mean outside of gender roles? There are physical attributes we have that women don’t. We grow facial hair, we grow muscle more easily, we are on average taller, tend to have better spatial intelligence, higher rates of aggression, higher rates of risk taking, more men lay on the extremes of distribution curves

All of those are due to mostly physical attributes outside of any perceived gender roles.

What does being a man mean to me? Well, it means you protect and provide for the people in your life. It means you are kind but stern. Just but merciful.

I’m a very old-school traditional kind of guy relative to the new generation. I was raised by immigrants from a more conservative country - and while I am certainly not politically conservative, I do prefer conservative gender roles to an extent.

I like women that are feminine, I like women who cook for me, in my relationships I’m the more “stoic” one and the woman is usually more flamboyant/emotional.

Ultimately we all know gender roles are all societally based rules. But I figure a lot of our notions of life in society are also societally based rules… doesn’t mean they are useless. Men are soldiers because they tend to make better soldiers. Women are nurses because they tend to be more empathetic and less threatening.

These are partly due to biology, partly due to gender roles. It’s an interesting question you bring up.

Pratai,

Gender is irrelevant.

RGB3x3,

The older I get and the more I learn, the more I have this opinion as well.

It really really doesn’t matter how someone presents themselves, in so far as it doesn’t impact their quality of life and the way people treat them.

Of course, it does impact the way people treat them, so it can’t be ignored, but… if you’re happy, respectful, and kind, it doesn’t matter if you’re man, woman, nonbinary, or any mix of any other gender.

Just be nice.

Pratai,

Exactly!

Conyak,

I agree. Other than medical reasons why would I even need to put it in words. My gender should have no bearing on my everyday activities.

Cryophilia,

My sense of my own gender?

I am a man. It was never a question for me. I am male. I feel it in my bones. I feel it the same way I feel that I am human. It’s a bedrock defining feature of me. I don’t have to wonder or convince myself or others. I am male, and I don’t feel like I have to act a certain way, because whatever I do is still male, by definition, because it’s me doing it and I am male. QED. I wanna wear a pink dress or play with dolls, doesn’t matter, still male. You don’t like it, fuck you and your insecurity. I do what I want, deal with it.

Gender in general?

I think it’s a spectrum, like almost all things. BUT, I think it’s not an even distribution. There’s a shit-ton of clustering near the ends of the spectrum (“cis male” and “cis female”). And I think for anyone who isn’t heavily to one end or the other, there’s a lot of confusion and “figuring out”, especially because people love labels, and kids love labels even more than anyone else. And gen Z kids love labels even more than previous generations, for some reason.

And then compounding this issue is the social factors, which you’ve asked me not to discuss. But it’s important to realize what is social pressure and what is just “gender”.

Edit: and I’ll also add that I feel bad for people closer to the middle of that spectrum, because the world we live in was not designed around them.

Zellith,

I'm just gonna say I'm not qualified to give a reasonable response. So I should shut up.

Sequentialsilence,

Straight white male here.

Are you trying to sleep with me / I’m trying to sleep with you? I’d like for you to have a vagina and preferably be straight or bi.

Otherwise I don’t care about what’s between your legs. Men can be caretakers, women can be construction workers, some random gender can be a computer programmer. I don’t care, as long as the job gets done.

If it’s outside of the bedroom, gender / sex, means nothing to me.

Masterblaster,

i'm not going to bother to make a separation between sex and gender because i find that to be just a little bit of hair splitting nonsense.

with that in mind, i think the male and female aspects of human life are integral to what it means to be a human. i study a lot of mythology and i dabble a bit in paleontology and neuroscience. i believe that there are significant differences between the sexes that act like a yin and yang. i do think we are out of balance and that most societies are heavily weighted towards male aspects. furthermore, i think we would really benefit from leaning into the female side of our humanity.

i believe in a lot of things that most of you would consider old-fashioned but are actually rooted in thousands of years of well-documented human behavior. furthermore, i believe in science. i'll punch a guy that hits a girl and i have no shame in saying that.

Jackthelad,

Well, I just went to reply to someone’s comment on mine and found that my comment no longer exists.

Why was it removed?

polysexualstick,

Could be because I reported it for being discriminating towards non-binary people because you negated their existence.

Jackthelad,

Well done on completely missing the point of what I said.

Cryophilia,

I’d like to humbly request you not do that. I like to see the comments of bigots, so I can vote them down and/or mock them.

But also, sometimes comments are misunderstood or have a good point among the bullshit. I feel like we should err on the side of leaving rather than censoring.

It’s your post so it’s your call, just giving my $0.02.

XEAL,

Lemmy, just as censoring as Reddit if not even worse. Yay.

Bluetreefrog,

If you want an uncensored instance/community, then don’t just whinge about it, set one up.

XEAL,

Then defederation will come

PatMustard,

Mod log is public, you should always be able to check

shinigamiookamiryuu,

Humans are like computers, we have a biological hardware and a biological software. Gender is the software. Sometimes the software does not reflect the hardware. One (very rough) analogy I give for this is to suppose you have a Mac and someone installed Windows 10 on it. Yes, it’s true that, on the outside, it’s a Mac, but for all intents and purposes, it’s a Windows 10 now. And in the long run, it shall be respected.

polysexualstick,

Nah, I don’t subscribe to that analogy because it still implies that there are “male” bodies and “female” bodies when I think every woman’s body is by definition a female body and every man’s body is by definition a male body.

shinigamiookamiryuu,

How does what I say imply that? All I said was that gender and sex were different.

polysexualstick,

You said:

Sometimes the software does not reflect the hardware.

If gender is the software and the body is the hardware, this is kind of the “born in the wrong body”-stuff many people still use and it implies that there is a kind of hardware/software combination that fits together and a kind of combination that does not.

midnight,
midnight avatar

I see where you're coming from, but there kinda is, as anyone who has experienced gender dysphoria can tell you.

HRT really does alter biological sex in a meaningful way, and I think a lot of people view medical transition as making the body fit the mind better.

shinigamiookamiryuu,

Or I was implying what the prefix “trans” implies. You can’t be “trans” if there’s no “base”. I wasn’t saying any were “superior”.

Maven,
@Maven@lemmy.world avatar

Humans are very much NOT binary when it comes to hardware. Intersex is a lot more common than people think though often in ways that aren’t exactly visible. I know 3 intersex people personally that are all intersex in different ways.

shinigamiookamiryuu,

You say that like I was implying that.

Maven,
@Maven@lemmy.world avatar

You’re right. I reread and you didn’t state the binary aspect. That was an assumption on my end due to previous times I’d heard a similar argument comparing humans and computers on this topic. I apologize for misreading and misunderstanding your point.

Cryophilia,

Please find a hobby that has nothing to do with computers.

I just…it bothers me when people insist on describing literally everything as some sort of metaphor to tech. Like…that’s not healthy.

shinigamiookamiryuu,

You interpreted all that simply from my choice of analogy?

Cryophilia,

Yeah.

JoBo, (edited )

Ky Schevers is an interesting voice on this sort of thing. There’s a good interview here: An “Ex-Detransitioner” Disavows the Anti-Trans Movement She Helped Spark

At 35, Schevers is no longer saying she was wrong about everything, either in her transition or her detransition. She now identifies as “a transmasculine butch dyke, genderqueer, something like that,” she told me, and her she/her pronouns contrast with her male-sounding voice and masculine presentation. She doesn’t think that every single detransitioned woman is really trans, and understands that others may have different experiences. Schevers believes strongly that every person deserves the right to question their gender identity and find their own paths.

She recognizes the good in her detransition experience, explaining: “There’s not always space in trans and queer communities for transmasculine people to talk about internalized misogyny. I could talk about it openly without worrying that people were going to be upset by it.” She even sees the good in some of the ideology, which is based in radical feminist ideas about internalized misogyny and male violence. “Not all the radical feminist ideas were terrible either: I learned a lot about women’s history,” Schevers said. “A lot of what I read was pretty interesting, so I’m glad that I explored that stuff.”

The internalised misogyny she talks about there is thought to be responsible for a small percentage of the small percentage of trans men who regret it. They mistook the whole “girls are crap because they like wearing dresses and playing with dolls” idea that so many tomboys have as meaning that they are trans rather than that they were being indoctrinated by a gender-obsessed society.

I don’t think anyone knows if transness would exist in a genuinely non-gender-based culture; I’ve seen the question asked a few times and the response has always been “no idea”. Is it more than just I hate the stereotype of my sex so much I won’t be forced to live down to it? (Note that this is subtly different to the internalised misogyny of the tomboy who hates the stereotype of their sex so much they despise members of the same sex.)

No one knows and I don’t think anyone should care, either. I don’t have to understand the deep bio-cultural science of transness, or have peer-reviewed studies to hand, to know that trans people exist and it is possible to not be an arse about it.

I’ve only ever heard the above argument made for tomboys (cis women) but I don’t see why it would not also be something that cis men could experience. Just because everyone knows it’s crap to be a girl doesn’t mean it isn’t also crap to be a boy. The gender binary is a mirror; you can’t treat women differently without also treating men differently and not all of the differences favour men (and often, they make everyone worse off because most men are not members of the patriarchy, of course).

polysexualstick,

You make some very good points imo

justlookingfordragon, (edited )
@justlookingfordragon@lemmy.world avatar

I just absolutely hate being a man in a “what role men have in society”-way.

I know exactly what you mean. A lot of random nonsense is seen as “unmanly” for no particular reason. I’ve seen grown ass men throw temper tantrums about doughnuts with pink glaze, because it is apparently uNmAnLy to even touch one, as if you would get a visit from the man police and they revoke your man card for even contemplating touching something in a “girly” color. It’s just complete and utter nonsense.

It is a lot healthier to not give a flying fuck about gender roles - but also harder, depending on the society you live in. I have the luxury of being a big, bearded dude so not many people dare to openly mock me when I do “unmanly” stuff - I let my niece paint my nails whenever she wants. I cry when movies get emotional. The last dog I owned was a mini pinscher, and I still miss her. I don’t like beer, cars, football/soccer/whatever. I bake and cook and I can get real passionate about it. I still own my first ever plushie.

…but I also have a bunch of friends who have been relentlessly bullied for similar stuff, gaslighted into believing that they deserved it for not being manly enough. And it breaks my heart every time I hear yet another story of someone killing their own passion, numbing themselves down to the point that they become unable to enjoy what they formerly loved, just to “fit in” a society that doesn’t accept deviation from the perceived norm.

Fuck gender roles in general. All they do is make people miserable for not fitting in.

EDIT: The above statement is not meant to bash trans folk by the way. What I dislike are the expectations tied to certain societal “roles” and the almost automatic ostracisation by “the society” if someone isn’t fulfilling enough of those expectations. Let people be who they want to be.

polysexualstick,

And it breaks my heart every time I hear yet another story of someone killing their own passion, numbing themselves down to the point that they become unable to enjoy what they formerly loved, just to “fit in” a society that doesn’t accept deviation from the perceived norm.

Yeah I feel like that was an issue for me as well and one of the reasons I either repressed or resented parts of myself for a long time. And I’m glad the journeys I had the last couple of years (the one I described in the post and also the journey of overcoming depression) not only helped me accept those parts of myself, but be happy and proud that I have them.

Cryophilia,

People like what you describe are why I feel glad I live in a very queer friendly area, even though I’m not queer. It’s just exhausting to deal with all the fragile egos in a repressed conservative area. I’m a cis hetero male, and queer people / allies respect the fact that even if I eat a pink-glazed donut, I am still a cis hetero male. I don’t have to prove my fucking manliness to every triggered dude bro I see.

Telodzrum,

In my experience (and therefore my opinion as it relates to my own thoughts and feelings), *it’s ineffable *and that is one of the reasons that it is so hard to communicate even mild dysphoria to people who don’t experience it.

cheese_greater,

Males start as females before they differentiate and yet, both have a phallus (clitoris/penis), guys’ ones are usually just bigger. We are all both, and either. It shouldn’t be this big societal discussion, its just another way the rich arbitrarily divide us from realizing what’s really going on

1stTime4MeInMCU,

I think the way we talk about gender and sex are very ambiguous because the term gender is overloaded to the tits.

I think it’s more accurate to think of gender identity and gender roles as completely separate concepts that shouldn’t even share terminology.

Gender identity is like the sex of your brain, which can either be male or female or ambiguous / neither. Sexual dimorphism of the human brain has been observed and it’s been observed that trans people’s brains match their understanding of their own gender identity more closely than what they were assigned at birth. So with that knowledge we can assume that someone can be “male brained” or “female brained” in as far as gender identity (or gender “map”)

Then you have “sex” which when used in the traditional sense is your external sex (male, female, ambiguous / neither).

Then you have gender expression / roles, which to me is where the weasel words start to slip in. Gender expression is how one virtue signals to the rest of their tribe they are their brain (and maybe body) sex. This is somewhat personal and somewhat social, because we ultimately decide how we want to behave in the world so the world sees us for who we believe ourselves to be.

Gender roles are the rules society creates that you’re supposed to follow so everyone is playing with the same deck when it comes to understanding what you are supposed to virtue signal and what you are supposed to presume when receiving that signal.

Gender roles are 100% fake in that they’re arbitrary and if they provide no net gain we can eliminate them. But gender is 100% real in that many people do experience strongly being their gender identity. If gender was totally fake trans people wouldn’t exist. So you have to be precise about in what ways you mean something like “gender is fake just abolish gender roles and everyone’s happy” because it’s definitely used to invalidate trans people and that’s not very cash money.

polysexualstick,

Exactly my point, I just find it very difficult or even impossible to put my experience of gender identity like you describe it into words

radix,
@radix@lemm.ee avatar

Do you think we could use ethnicity as an analogy? For example, one “ethnicity role” might be that Asians are supposed to own little convenience stores like Kim’s Convenience, or something. That “ethnicity role” is completely ridiculous and shouldn’t exist, but ethnic identity itself should/does exist, and some people will more readily practice their ethnic identities than others.

1stTime4MeInMCU,

Interesting comparison!

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