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yeah i mean obviously my perspective is inherently biased as someone who tends to be very comfortable falling in line with one set of gender expectations but i feel like a binary or i guess bimodal to be more precise with a certain amount of people who lie outside of it will always exist in most human cultures, i don't think total gender abolition is possible, i think the existence of gender in some form or another is actually an essential part of the human condition, it's just that how gender is experienced varies wildly from culture to culture across time and space, and of course there will always be people who lie outside of it or don't feel like they're on it, and more cultures than not tend to have a significant and often revered place in their society for such people, but it is quite a different thing than those of us who just switch teams, even though in such cultures filling one of those social roles might have been better than nothing for us it's a completely different phenomena, so for instance i think there have always been both hijra and trans women in India, although the latter wasn't really wasn't much of a concept there until relatively recently (compared to a cultural institution dating back millennia like the former)
it's murky though obviously, since the actual physiological mechanisms that make trans and gender non-conforming people behave the ways that they do are wildly complex and likely can never be totally understood, and people learn more about themselves through out their entire life, for a while I thought genuinely I was just a gay man and my inclination towards expressing femininity was more of a desire for a particular role with-in that community, but I soon realized after pursuing this that it was much more far reaching, but because i had quite a bit of internalized transphobia and assumed i would make for a hideous woman who'd never pass, and that that would be a fate worse than death, i thought i must be some sort of non-binary person, but quickly into exploring this with a therapist i came to the conclusion i had to make the lifestyle choice that i did and things went incredibly well, far better than i could have possibly imagined, and any shred of doubt i had was completely eliminated when i started to be very close to stealth in an area that leans liberal anyway, i haven't been unintentionally misgendered for quite some time now, and every single time someone addresses me as miss or sweety or a guy flirts with me or holds the door for me or another woman confides with me it's affirmed constantly in a loop, and i feel more and more at home in the role and increasingly happier with my decision, i admit that at this point i do take it as pretty much an a priori truth that i am a trans woman and that that is a type of woman and no one one on earth will convince me otherwise, even though i freely admit that i could be completely wrong and this tradition of gender transition won't end up taking off, i'm not wrong, but i admit that i could be
ANyway despite there being many exceptions, i think that roughly speaking when we look at the historical facts 3 general categories or tendencies emerge one towards what we consider masculinity, one towards femininity, and one that tends towards both or neither, and this has been and by all available evidence will remain a constant, there are cultures that have as many as 5 or more distinct gender roles but in the scheme of things those are pretty rare and in all honesty difficult to wrap my head around, and looking at it in a crude way, you can usually explain these instances in terms of our own understanding of gender, since they seem to approximate maybe two kinds of man and two kinds of woman and perhaps additionally a role for those we'd consider right in the middle of our gender binary
not to mention the fact that even comparing cultures with the familiar strong gender binary, their understandings of masculinity and femininity can be quite disparate and sometimes even opposites, it's pretty well known that certain traits many east Asian cultures consider explicitly masculine aren't considered as such here in the West and might even be thought of as timid or weak, in other words, in a society that is structurally misogynist, feminine
but i still agree with what people saying that it's becoming much less rigid, and i still think like i said earlier in t… Comment too long. Click here to view the full text. |
