Fundamentally, from my point of view as a transfeminine American, this all comes back to the idea that gender is socially constructed. It is socially dependent and entirely defined by the social...
Exemplary
Fundamentally, from my point of view as a transfeminine American, this all comes back to the idea that gender is socially constructed. It is socially dependent and entirely defined by the social interactions around it; a society with no connection to our own would develop its own gender roles, and indeed this is a topic that is studied heavily in anthropology.
Some of what gender constitutes in our, and other, societies is descriptive. Because gender as we have it today is highly correlated with sex, gender roles originally stemmed from normative sexual traits; height differences, ability to build muscle, etc. However, social understandings of these traits, and especially the ways in which our biological urge to find desireable mates have been exploited by various social orders, have made gender more or less prescriptive at various times in history.
Thanks to the triumphs of 20th century feminism, we find ourselves in a position where women are legally able to do anything men are in many jurisdictions (though, of course, gender discrimination remains a serious concern). Social pressures, however, often proscribe (that is, apply a negative prescriptive pressure) to women entering certain lines of work, for example. For many people, a bias against femininity and towards masculinity still guides much of their unconscious thinking - even people who are committed feminists! However, openly expressing these attitudes is pretty uncommon in most social circles - that is, there is a social proscription against the explicit social proscription of women taking on men's roles.
However, these descriptive categories are also deployed prescriptively by society to, for example, delineate "wearing dresses" and "doing housework" as, to varying degrees, outside of acceptable masculinity. While it is socially unacceptable in many social circles to, say, tell off a woman for wearing a suit or a button-down and jeans, it is much more often acceptable to tell off or explicitly disparage a man for doing traditionally feminine activities, even within progressive spaces.
This is one reason we see that, while numbers of out trans men are increasing, they remain lower than the numbers of trans women. It is easier to be a masculine woman than to be a feminine man, at least in most of Western society.
There are a lot of other factors here; trans men, for instance, tend to have more gender-confirming surgeries, because while trans women can often alter their secondary sexual characteristics with hormones alone (there's a reason estradiol tablets are called "titty skittles"), trans men cannot. Obvious breasts are often enough to mark someone as "female" in the eyes of most of society, and binding long-term can be harmful to cardiovascular health.
So, basically, I would say that gender is dialectical. Society uses gender categories to describe the activities of individuals in a set of broad groups, but then uses limited cues to group people into those categories and prescriptively punishes people for not "correctly" fitting the various stereotypes they have for the categories they have assigned.
As to non-binary gender identities, I think @teaearlgraycold said this best:
gender is an illusion that some of us can’t return to once we realize its fickle nature.
If you find the expectations society places on you because of the gender you have been assigned incongruous and you recognize that gender is a dialectical construction, you have two options: either embracing it as essential and rejecting its dialectical nature, which is what TERFs and many regressive trans people do ("gender is sex and sex is binary" on the one hand, and "gender is not sex but gender is binary" on the other), or completely rejecting it as a concept (and, optionally, rebuilding it from scratch in your particular subculture). Agender people, many people who identify simply as "nonbinary", and many genderfluid people are at this point; their social circles do not proscribe gender-nonconforming behavior strongly enough to override their human urge to do whatever the fuck they want.
Personally, I think this is what makes gender exploration such a journey. Gender is deeply tied into our society, and accepting that "male" and "female" are meaningful-but-arbitrary categories with strong-but-arbitrary expectations placed on people that fall into them means reconstructing your whole worldview. Some people come out of that wanting to opt out entirely. Some people want to stick with the gender they were originally assigned, but with a deeper understanding of it. And some people, myself included, have decided that the other binary gender is "good enough", and a hell of a lot better than the original model, and go down the binary trans route.
I recognize this is a long post, and I hope it's useful. To get back to the specific question you asked, though, let's examine this paragraph:
I would be non-binary because I don't fit either manhood or womanhood. But seeing myself as non-binary seems to reject the idea that manhood or womanhood are infinitely flexible, which I'm not entirely sure I want to reject. But if they're infinitely flexible, what's the point of distinguishing sex from gender?
Gender is meaningful only as it helps us relate to other people in society. My answer to this is simple - do whatever the fuck you want, and call yourself whatever the fuck you want. Be a guy who wears dresses. Be nonbinary but don't alter your gender presentation at all. Transition like a binary trans woman but keep your gender marker and name. Call yourself different names on different days. If your friends can put up with it, come up with a set of pronouns that feel fun and interesting to you. (One of my very good friends use fae/fem/faer as a pronoun set, pronounced like "they" with an f instead of a þ sound.) Who cares? Humans made the whole thing up, and none of them have more authority over your behavior than you.
What I think you're touching upon here is best described by Simone de Beauvoir as "The Other". What makes a man a man is a rigid rule set, and is "superior" to anything else, and if you don't...
But I do think it's true that masculinity seems to be more rigidly enforced
What I think you're touching upon here is best described by Simone de Beauvoir as "The Other". What makes a man a man is a rigid rule set, and is "superior" to anything else, and if you don't abide by these rules, you are now an "other". Why do feminine men, trans men, etc. get called women as an insult? Because they are not masculine, they are others, just like women. de Beauvoir's whole idea is if you aren't a man you're just the other gender, and their is no female gender. It makes sense too, anyone can like the color blue, but liking pink isn't masculine, so if a man likes it they are now "women". Same goes for jeans /dresses etc. and anything that seems like there is a double standard for. Reading The Second Sex was incredibly helpful to understand just some of the social stuff with gender.
Cis gay guy here. Early in the pandemic I was buying comfort clothing for home wear, and I found a nice pajama robe. It was all one piece and hung loosely around me, roughly down to my knees. It...
Exemplary
Cis gay guy here.
Early in the pandemic I was buying comfort clothing for home wear, and I found a nice pajama robe. It was all one piece and hung loosely around me, roughly down to my knees. It was super cozy and super comfortable, and I wore it around my house with delight.
It wasn't until I stepped outside that I suddenly felt uncomfortable about it. I took my dog out to go to the bathroom one morning while wearing it, and I realized that the construction of the item very much made it read more as a "dress" than a "pajama robe". I remember standing in my backyard, weirdly conscious of how I looked and whether or not my neighbors were looking at me through their windows.
My queer reflex of "fuck with gender norms; don't give a shit about people who will judge you" kicked in, and I tried to adopt a sort of "let them stare!" attitude about it. Unfortunately, no matter how much I intellectualized the moment and reminded myself that I believe that anyone should be allowed to wear whatever they like free from judgment, I couldn't shake the feeling that I, genuinely and honestly, was put off by the idea of other people seeing me in what they perceived to be a dress.
I don't have a strong sense of gender identity in myself. I don't know what it means to be "male" and I have the hardest time condensing that down into a standard or a rule in any meaningful way. I think it would be easy for me to just say gender isn't real and anyone can do whatever they want.
But, standing in my backyard, I was hyper-aware of the fact that I didn't want to be seen in what could be perceived as women's attire. I do think there was a tiny bit of that rooted in a fear of judgment, but there was a much bigger part of it that was just this odd and deep-seated feeling of dissonance. The "dress" was communicating something about me that wasn't true -- it was saying something to my neighbors that I didn't want it to say.
I loved wearing the pajamas in my home not because they felt like a "dress" but just because they were comfortable, and I think part of that comfort came from the fact that the pajamas weren't communicating anything to anyone. I wasn't wearing them as a dialogue with myself, and my husband wasn't reading anything into them besides "kfwyre likes spending time in a soft wearable blanket". Stepping outside in those clothes, however, was a way of starting a dialogue (whether I wanted to or not), and I didn't like what the pajamas would "say" about me. It was communication I wasn't in control of, and it felt like I was telling the world something inaccurate.
I think I felt, in that moment, the tiniest, smallest smidgen of what many trans people feel nearly constantly. For the trans people I know in real life, being seen as and affirmed for their gender is like oxygen. To be without it is suffocating. I was uncomfortable with just five minutes of dissonance, standing in my backyard where probably nobody else even saw me anyway, but the trans people I know have had to live in that dissonance, inescapably, for years, in nearly every setting of their lives.
I think if we deconstruct gender too much, or go all nihilistic with it, we run the risk of invalidating their experiences. I think doing so can take away a method of communication for people who very much need to be heard in that way.
Sarah McBride conveys it better than I can in Tomorrow Will Be Different. She talks about coming out to her parents as a trans woman and tries to convey to them not just the label itself, but what it means and represents for her as a person:
As the questions went on, it became clear that my parents were struggling with the same empathy gap that I later would realize was one of the main barriers to trans equality among progressive voters: They couldn’t wrap their minds around how it might feel to have a gender identity that differs from one’s assigned sex at birth.
With sexual orientation it’s a bit easier. Most people can extrapolate from their own experiences with love and lust, but they don’t have an analogous experience with being transgender.
“The best way I can describe it for myself,” I told them, “is a constant feeling of homesickness. An unwavering ache in the pit of my stomach that only goes away when I can be seen and affirmed in the gender I’ve always felt myself to be. And unlike homesickness with location, which eventually diminishes as you get used to the new home, this homesickness only grows with time and separation.”
My dad, a longtime progressive, also said that he didn’t understand how one could feel like something that is a social construct. Wasn’t gender, and all the things associated with it, just a creation of society? Wasn’t that what feminism had taught us?
I explained to him that, for me, gender is a lot like language. Language, too, is a social construct, but one that expresses very real things. The word “happiness” was created by humans, but that doesn’t diminish the fact that happiness is a very real feeling. People can have a deeply held sense of their own gender even if the descriptions, characteristics, attributes, and expressions of that gender are made up by society.
And just as with happiness—for which there are varying words, expressions, and actions that demonstrate that same feeling—gender can have an infinite number of expressions. We can respect that people can have a very real gender identity while also acknowledging that gender is fluid and that gender-based stereotypes are not an accurate representation of the rich diversity within any gender identity.
Thinking about gender in this way was transformative for me — her framing of it as a “homesickness” made me cry — but it's also an incomplete picture. For a while this was where my understanding of gender stopped, and I credit nonbinary people (including some amazing community members here -- looking at you @Gaywallet!) for helping me carry my understanding further. If gender is a language and some people need to use it for expression, there are others who don't -- including those who resent being asked to use it at all. Their dissonance is of a different kind -- not a conflict of meanings within a language, but a conflict with the language itself.
Nonbinary actor Asia Kate Dillion has a good quote about this in Visible: Out on Television:
I was assigned female at birth. There was a gender identity placed on top of that which was "girl" and "woman", but that is not my gender identity, and so taking it off by using "they/them" pronouns for me is what felt really right.
I really like their phrasing of "taking it off", as it helps me visualize being nonbinary as not necesssarily a space "between" genders (though that's also a valid way of being nonbinary) but apart from them.
A way I've started thinking about this is a separate spectrum that goes from "gender fulfillment" to "gender abstention". The "fulfillment" end of the spectrum is people who find satisfaction in using gender as a method of communication about themselves. These people don't have to be trans (though they certainly can be); some cis men and women live in this space too. I was talking with my friend who's a father, and fatherhood has very much pushed him far in the direction of "gender fulfillment". It is how he is a man and how he wants to be seen as one, and it is positive and wonderful and enriching for him.
On the other end of the spectrum is gender abstention -- people who want to opt out of gender entirely and don't necessarily see or understand the value of it as it applies to them. I'm more towards this side myself, and I think it's possible to be in that space without being nonbinary. I can't say why I'm male; I don't feel a particularly strong internal sense that I am male; but I also don't feel any pressing need to, like Asia Kate Dillon did, "take off" a gender identity from myself. In fact, standing in my backyard in what looked like a dress was off-putting to me, so resolving that feeling by later choosing to be seen in male clothes the next time I went out was a tiny step towards the fulfillment side of things, so I don't think I'm fully on the side of abstention, even if I'm much closer to that than the other.
Also, how much of all this is innate versus how much of that is societal is hard to disentangle, and in many ways I feel like I can't isolate either. If I lived in a different culture, it's very likely I'd be on a different part of the spectrum, because gender would mean something different to me and to those around me. It’s also important to me that I don’t diminish the experiences or dignity of those elsewhere on the spectrum. Even if I lean towards gender abstention for myself, I don’t want to impose an abstention on others, especially if they thrive at the fulfillment end. That’s something I want to celebrate and respect in them, just as I hope they‘ll respect my space and not tell me that I’m, say, “not man enough”.
I'll give a major caveat here that this fulfillment <-> abstention spectrum is something I've been mulling over and haven't really talked out with others at all yet (this post is actually the first time I've pulled these thoughts from outside my head into the real world). Also, I'm cis, so it's very likely that I'm missing some important, major stuff in my considerations over this. This framework I just invented has gone through literally no workshopping or stress testing or feedback cycles, so it could all be complete bullshit (and if it is, please let me know -- I'm genuinely open to thoughts on this, especially from our trans and nonbinary users here). I'm sharing it here simply because it's where I'm currently at in my thinking about gender, but I'll readily admit that this is an ongoing process. Much like you, I don't feel like I have answers right now.
You have blown my mind! Gender as a language is such a good way to look at it. I would give you an exemplary label if I hadn't just used one. (So many good comments in this thread!) Tomorrow when...
You have blown my mind! Gender as a language is such a good way to look at it. I would give you an exemplary label if I hadn't just used one. (So many good comments in this thread!) Tomorrow when I have another one to give you're getting it.
Also, how much of all this is innate versus how much of that is societal is hard to disentangle, and in many ways I feel like I can't isolate either.
If gender is a language then it's impossible to disentangle personal from societal. Language is how we express ourselves, but it's also inherently tied to society. Even one way communication is a two party affair. It depends on the speaker and the audience (and their idea of each other). It changes based on who we are talking to, including when we are talking to ourselves.
I deeply relate to your story about being seen in what appeared to be a dress. I tried wearing skirts and I was deeply uncomfortable wearing them. I have a purse and I'm completely comfortable carrying it anywhere I go. So some traditionally feminine expression I'm okay with, but not a skirt. Thinking about it as language I think the difference is that the skirt feels loud while the purse feels like a firm but quiet statement. I don't like being loud.
A way I've started thinking about this is a separate spectrum that goes from "gender fulfillment" to "gender abstention".
I agree with what you said about this. For some people gender is an important part of how they see and present themselves and others want gender to just leave them alone already, with people everywhere between those extremes.
I would say that the same can be applied to sexual orientation, as well, with a spectrum from "orientation fulfillment" to "orientation abstention". By orientation abstention I don't mean ace or aro. People who are aro/ace can just as strongly identify with that as allosexuals do with their orientation, and get fulfillment out of identifying that way. I'm talking about people that don't strongly identify with an orientation.
I'm on that abstention end of orientation. I don't strongly identify as hetero, homo, bi, or pan. Nor do I really identify with ace or aro. I have tried many times to put labels on myself and they never stick.
For what it's worth many people who have made gender charts typically put male/female on the x axis and strong/weak association on the y axis. In some cases it will just be male on one axis female...
For what it's worth many people who have made gender charts typically put male/female on the x axis and strong/weak association on the y axis. In some cases it will just be male on one axis female on the other with affinity increasing in one direction. I think people who've spent a lot of time considering gender consider it to exist on more than just two axes, as if you exist outside the binary you may not find an easy way to place yourself on this chart, but at a basic level I believe placing yourself somewhere towards a pole which represents your identity and somewhere towards a pole which represents how strong that feeling is are two necessary components of mapping any gender.
I have no expertise here in anything other than being a hermit, but acting as a metaphor for life seems pretty fruitful and I'm going to run with it a bit. All the world's a stage, but maybe some...
I have no expertise here in anything other than being a hermit, but acting as a metaphor for life seems pretty fruitful and I'm going to run with it a bit.
All the world's a stage, but maybe some of us care more about role-playing than others. Maybe you have strong opinions about what role you want to play? Others of us might be minimalist about it. You can't help but play some role when you go outside the house, but maybe you're not into acting and you're not looking for applause. You're fine with playing "Generic Customer #5" at the store, as long as you can buy what you need and get off the stage.
Sometimes blending into the background is a goal. Sometimes it's hard. When you walk into a room, does everyone turn and look? Are you okay with that attention? Do you want to be okay with attention?
Playing bit parts and avoiding attention can be lonely, and often they don't pay well. You try out for more. Dates. Job interviews. The spotlight's on you! Can you play a leading role? "Be yourself" they tell you. Which, means, I suppose, playing a role that's very familiar to you and that you're comfortable doing all the time, even under pressure.
Your relationship with an audience's expectations can be fraught, making some roles harder to play than others. What roles do you want to get better at? Do you want to play against type or not? Maybe some environments make you uncomfortable, because you don't see any role for you to play there. Maybe there is a role, but you don't want to play the stranger, the tourist, the foreigner, or worse.
Some people are going to be more skillful actors than others. Sometimes they slip. I think most of us here would say you should be tolerant, going along with others' intent. Maybe the most comfortable place to be is where everyone knows you're playing a difficult role, that you might slip, but that's okay, you can try again. A forgiving, nurturing audience for struggling actors.
But an audience can be wicked when they see someone playing a role that they don't think they have a right to play. They see a phony. A shill. Maybe a spy? How do you do, fellow kids? Maybe they paid for these tickets and are expecting competence, good service! Exposing the imposter seems like justice. It's a trope.
What does authenticity mean, other than knowing your role so well, being so skilled at it, that nobody thinks to question your right to play it?
I think it might be fruitful to talk about gender roles with all of the above in mind, but it's probably better if someone else does it, so I'll stop here.
Hey there. I feel similarly. My conclusion is that gender is an illusion that some of us can’t return to once we realize its fickle nature. I have no interest in breaking that illusion for the...
Exemplary
Hey there. I feel similarly. My conclusion is that gender is an illusion that some of us can’t return to once we realize its fickle nature. I have no interest in breaking that illusion for the many people that apply it in a healthy manner to their lives. Just like how I have no interest in turning a kind theist into an atheist. The world in many ways is better off with religion. There are a minority of people that use religion to do more harm than good.
The same goes for gender. If a person sees themselves as a man and they use that idea to reinforce good traits they see in themselves and that makes them happy then I’m glad they feel masculine, male gendered, etc. The same goes for a person that feels they are a woman.
In the collective idea of gender each role in the binary has positive traits. We talk a lot of toxic masculinity but there are positive aspects of the masculine archetype. Protecting people you love, having a strong body. These should not be exclusively owned by men. Men can also give a toxic twist to these traits - but any virtue can be perverted.
I don’t consider myself non-binary for the same reason I don’t quite consider myself non-religious or completely outside of the world of sports fans. I was raised under the Quaker religion and I continue to enjoy most of what the religion has to offer - but I think there is no chance that there’s a higher power like the Bible describes. And trying to define what a higher power could still be once that proposal is off the table isn’t worth my thought. I do actually go to a Phillies game or two per year and feel somewhat invested in the team so if I feel like being a sports fan I’m a sports fan for that day.
I’m not sure if there’s a better classification for people like me. Non binary isn’t right. I’m more so just gender agnostic. When forced to given an answer male is the best fit. But like how I don’t attend religious services very often - gender’s just not a mode of thought I put myself into very often.
I want to get to the point where I'm gender agnostic/apathetic. Society and the ideas ingrained in my head make it hard. Religiously, I'm an apatheist. I don't consider myself an agnostic because...
I want to get to the point where I'm gender agnostic/apathetic. Society and the ideas ingrained in my head make it hard.
Religiously, I'm an apatheist. I don't consider myself an agnostic because I'm certain there's no higher power (at least not one that matches anything humans have thought up). But I'm at a point where I kind of don't care. I don't need to spend any energy considering the question anymore. To get to this point I had to go through a period where I thought a lot about it and cared very much.
I want to get to a point where I feel about gender the same way I currently feel about religion: That I don't care and I don't think about it. But I'm not there yet.
Not to force you into a box or tell you that you should or shouldn't use a specific label, but what's wrong with the label 'gender agnostic'? I rather like the ring of it.
Not to force you into a box or tell you that you should or shouldn't use a specific label, but what's wrong with the label 'gender agnostic'? I rather like the ring of it.
Oh I guess I just read it with a similar tone to the paragraph before where you talk about how you don't consider yourself non-binary or non-religious, apologies... mostly want to say I vibe with...
Oh I guess I just read it with a similar tone to the paragraph before where you talk about how you don't consider yourself non-binary or non-religious, apologies... mostly want to say I vibe with the existence of that label and celebrate its use
My personal sensibilities and views about gender is that it is both prescriptive and descriptive if you separate it into components, and is especially different in what is internally determined vs...
My personal sensibilities and views about gender is that it is both prescriptive and descriptive if you separate it into components, and is especially different in what is internally determined vs externally determined when you separate it. Gender is a role you fill, a performance you put on, an experience you have, a thing other people assign to you, and an identity you assign to yourself. And none of those things are necessarily fixed and can very based on context.
To some degree I think that being homosexual automatically confers a degree of gender non conformity or "non binaryness". So much of gender is built around heterosexual attraction and heterosexual roles. I'm a lesbian and I truly feel like my gender is "lesbian" more than it is "woman". What most people ascribe to the "woman" role and "womanhood" simply don't fit me. Gender non conformity is super common in queer people too and I prefer to dress and present androgynous. My interests and hobbies are both masculine and feminine, and I've been told my typing style is somewhat masculine but my mannerisms IRL are slightly feminine.
On the internet, most of the time, I present as male and I'm gendered as male. In real life, I present as a female bodied person who wears mostly men's clothes and 98% of the time I'm gendered as female by others. In lesbian and wlw circles, I'm not a butch lesbian or a femme lesbian but I'm considered "boyish" or "masculine" to some degree. So my gender experience definitely changes based on context.
There's also the aspect of "transness" itself as a gender, like experiencing dysphoria or doing physical transition things like voice training, hrt, surgery, etc. Some people might classify me as being under the trans umbrella, but in my personal definition I think it would only fit me if I had strong dysphoria or a desire for physical transition.
There are a shitton of different philosophical approaches to the nature of gender, especially in the queer community, and it can be hard to pin down and is definitely a source of a lot of debate! I've got a "live and let live" approach. (I think most of us do). Even if my conception on gender takes into account how outside observers gender me, for some people the main and largest component of their sense of gender is identity and internal experience. These kinds of conversations are fascinating to me so thank you for a good prompt!
I make that quite simple: gender is whatever each individual chooses it to be in respect to themselves. Whatever you tell me you are, whatever meanings "gender" carry to you: I'm fine. I don't...
I make that quite simple: gender is whatever each individual chooses it to be in respect to themselves. Whatever you tell me you are, whatever meanings "gender" carry to you: I'm fine. I don't need to be convinced.
You can certainly analyze that under some more or less rigorous logic, that is enlightening for some. Gender Trouble was an educational read back in college. But that is not a requirement in my view.
My personal view: gender is something you do. It is neither descriptive or prescriptive: it is performative.
As for myself, I'm a rather typical cis-male. That is what I wish to perform.
This is my favorite thing to see in threads like this, to be honest. More cis people should think seriously about their gender; it's interesting, and there's nothing wrong with landing back where...
This is my favorite thing to see in threads like this, to be honest. More cis people should think seriously about their gender; it's interesting, and there's nothing wrong with landing back where you started with a better understanding of how you relate to society!
I absolutely second the recommendation for Gender Trouble and I'd also like to throw in a rec of just about anything by S. Bear Bergman for anyone interested in a nuanced transmasculine perspective.
I can't give all the credit to Judith Butler. I have a very smart gay friend that taught me a lot. There are things he said without even thinking that I remember to this day. Some people have this...
I can't give all the credit to Judith Butler. I have a very smart gay friend that taught me a lot. There are things he said without even thinking that I remember to this day. Some people have this ability to make everyone around them smarter without even trying.
One day we were talking about wether someone was gay or not, and he said: "I don't care who you have sex with, in what circumstances, and how many times: if tou tell me you're gay, than you're gay. If you tell me you're not, than you're not". I could feel myself becoming a better person as he spoke.
For some, gender is prescriptive. For others, it's descriptive. I've never fully understood gender in the same way that I struggle to understand anything that is defined loosely by humans....
For some, gender is prescriptive. For others, it's descriptive.
I've never fully understood gender in the same way that I struggle to understand anything that is defined loosely by humans. Language is a great example of something with a loose definition - how many times have you heard someone use a word in a way you didn't expect? For many of these people they've accidentally ended up using the 'wrong' word when they meant to use another. This can be because the 'correct' word didn't show up in their thoughts, or it could be because they were taught that the definition of this word wasn't what the dictionary says it was (and by taught it could have been formally or through their own intuition).
I put 'wrong' and 'correct' in quotes above because if you take a second and step back, what is a word but a communally accepted definition, using other words to define it? Have you ever found it interesting how this is a precarious house of cards? How can you define a word without understanding other words? Perhaps with a gesture, a motion, context, or other cues. At the end of the day, everyone must infer the definitions of the first words they learn, for which they build a castle of meaning upon. At their essence, words are merely the conversion of an abstract idea (a thought) to a concrete idea (a word) and by its very nature some information must be loss when we do this.
Given this information, any definition has some wiggle room. But you've probably naturally reacted a bit concerned about this idea, or at least skeptical. The sky is the sky, it's blue, and we're all on the planet earth - these don't have wiggle room. To an extent, I'd say you are correct - there are words in the world which have much more solid definitions than others. You won't find many people questioning whether there is a sky in a video game but conversely you probably will find people with differing ideas of what constitutes a party. We have a spectrum with words... some we can tie to relatively concrete ideas that are either perceived similarly enough among most humans for agreement, such as visible spectra of color, or are tied to specific enough of circumstances that they hardly get misinterpreted such as pneumonia; and some words are very loosely tied to ideas because humans vary quite a bit and we end up with words like religion and gender.
These latter words, which seem to be defined differently in a very tangible and understandable way simply by asking a group of ten humans what the word means and listening to their answers, are the kind of words that I have had to learn how to compromise with. I do not feel I can ever fully understand them because they do not seem to hold a 'correct' definition to me. In fact, gender is so varied that I legitimately have no words I can say describe gender or are a characteristic of gender. Even thinking within the binary, I can't say that any one profession, character trait, set of ideas, type of action, emotion, or any other word only belongs to people who tell me they are male or female. Outside of the binary it gets even more confusing with modern interpretations of gender including affinity to concepts as simple as "fairy-folk" or as complicated as 'a grand, old piano- painted black, shining, somewhat glossy. Covered in vines holding beautiful, golden flowers, sitting in the middle of a forest; forgotten, yet not lost. A cat sits atop, staring into the distance with a glare in it's tiny marble eyes. The sun lays itself atop the base in streaks, like looking through swaying; almost open blinds'. I find myself rather drawn towards this description in its explicitness, but I've never heard a human describe their gender in either such detail, or such a unique way - it is certainly not what I expected, even in a thread of non-binary individuals explaining their gender.
At the end of the day, the ultimate decider of a words definition and worth is two-fold. Society gets to decide what words are important at any one point in time because humans as a whole decide a word is defined a specific way through conversation about that word; however, each individual human also gets to decide what words are important to them and what they mean. If gender is important to you and defining yourself within the confines of what society tells you gender is are important to you, then it's just a matter of finding the right society to align yourself inside in a way which makes you comfortable and okay with moving on from this consideration of where you fit at the appropriate pace. You may find the need to align yourself with a different society than you normally spend time in, or travel to another society to gather the words and understanding to investigate and ultimately move past this with more knowledge of your own experience and that's perfectly okay! It's a journey and the ultimate goal at the end of this is an understanding of yourself and a better understanding of the experiences of others. Much like a cat presented a cat bed by its owner, you shouldn't feel the need to settle down into the boxes that someone else gives you- reject the cat bed and go find a cardboard box that speaks to your heart, because at the end of the day you're the one laying down to go sleep and you should do it where you feel comfortable, not where someone else tells you that you are comfortable.
You may already know this, but I thought it was amusing that you picked the sky being blue as an example of something that has a solid linguistic definition. In fact, there are a number of...
You may already know this, but I thought it was amusing that you picked the sky being blue as an example of something that has a solid linguistic definition. In fact, there are a number of languages that don't have a distinct word for blue. Color is a very wobbly thing when it comes to language. I think this actually reinforces your point. Language is pretty imprecise, even when we try very hard to pin it down. Generally the best we can do is try to describe what words commonly mean, and then desperately try to keep track as the usage changes under our noses.
I decided to choose words not as far on one side of the spectrum as words which are ultra-specific and scientific in nature such as pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, because I was...
I decided to choose words not as far on one side of the spectrum as words which are ultra-specific and scientific in nature such as pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, because I was hoping the conflict that some would see in these words would further reinforce my point 😉
Personally from an introspective perspective I don't feel like anything when it comes to gender, I can feel tired, hopeful, or a pain in my knee, but I never feel (wo)manly, I don't even know what...
I can't figure out if my manhood is only a description of all the ways I fit society's changing definition of a man, or if my manhood comes from inside of me and out of my personal, independent identity.
Personally from an introspective perspective I don't feel like anything when it comes to gender, I can feel tired, hopeful, or a pain in my knee, but I never feel (wo)manly, I don't even know what that would be like. It seems much more like an abstract concept to me, and thus purely intellectual & descriptive. To me your confusion about answering that question doesn't seem indicative to anything, besides being a normal human being.
Something that might be helpful that I don't see discussed much on theses posts I'd like to add is just the most "basic" definition of gender most cis/het people understand, i.e. what's in your...
Something that might be helpful that I don't see discussed much on theses posts I'd like to add is just the most "basic" definition of gender most cis/het people understand, i.e. what's in your pants. Obviously no one ever replies with this, and for good reasons already mentioned, but the one /merit/ to this definition is it's approachable, and more importantly it's a good starting point. It's really easy to get lost in a philosophical train of thought of what does gender mean, what do others expect of me, and all that existential fun stuff. That's not a bad thing, for the most part it's incredibly helpful and interesting thing to think about, but it can be distracting and feel like it won't ever resolve itself (and in someways it won't, you are always changing as a person, and so is culture). The one thing that won't ever change is what body you're most comfortable in, hence the og definition. As you think about these things, just make sure you keep the touchstone of "what body would I be most comfortable in", or really: do you need reassignment surgery. Personally, gender expression and labels are something I think about, but in the same way I think about hobbies, art, what movies/music I like, etc. and I give them the same emotional weight. What I encourage most people to do is the same, don't worry about if you feel your gender expression, labels, etc is changing, it's ok. The single thing that is worth worrying about and giving emotional weight to is if you are comfortable in your body, and if you need "reassignment" surgery. If just thinking about this stresses you out, that's a hint it's worth thinking about more, if not, don't worry about it! Just remember to check in with yourself! As you can tell by the replies gender is an insanely deep topic, and it can seem overwhelming, but seriously, don't let it, it should be fun and an academic/self-expressing venture, realizing you like skirts/jeans/etc. does NOT mean you need to worry about ANYTHING or that you need hormones, surgery, or whatever. The only thing that is worth worrying about is if you don't feel comfortable with your body.
I think attempting to taxonomize the complexities of human behavior and assigning any importance to those classifications is regressive - or at best, a mostly pointless semantic exercise. At...
Exemplary
I think attempting to taxonomize the complexities of human behavior and assigning any importance to those classifications is regressive - or at best, a mostly pointless semantic exercise. At worst, it reinforces tribal behavior that, while often supportive and probably necessary in the short-term for minorities at serious risk (given a society that doesn't like change), hinders integration and the resolution of differences long-term.
Let me be clear, non-conformity of any kind (you know what I mean) is fucking awesome, and I wholeheartedly support anyone that defies society's expectations of them... but I believe, in general, the urge to define one's identity by one's exclusionary differences to others is counterproductive and unhealthy. It's a symptom of harmful social pressures, not a solution to them. Tribes are formed along those differentiations, dialog between conflicting tribes becomes so much more difficult because they only see each other in terms of how they disagree, and the battle quickly becomes about - not resolving differences and learning to live and let live - but about defeating the outgroup. Even if the other tribe is totally unjustified, forming one counter to them hands them a label with which they can and will assign whatever meaning fits their prejudices and that they'll use as a substitute instead of actually considering their shared humanity. Likewise, a well-intentioned and morally substantiated tribe can trivialize and/or mischaracterize their antagonists' motivations and reasons for being the way they are, distracting from the fundamental problems that need to be addressed.
Regarding gender, it is contradictory to me when people who believe gender is a social abstraction and matter of personal choice also take it so seriously. If the semantics of the gender labels is arbitrary, they have no utility as a standard with which people can describe themselves. If you try to define a standard, you're inevitably going to marginalize people who don't fit the model. If you try to define a label for every "misfit," your standard is gonna be a huge mess that takes more effort to use than just explaining whatever specific characteristics matter most. And then, even for the people who do fit the model, whether they're cis or not, by identifying with the gender that they relate to most, they're necessarily reinforcing the notion that the labels have some concrete or social meaning and that they matter. If I'm considered a TERF for that... fuck, I wouldn't even know how to respond because that's often an emotionally charged pejorative whose denotation doesn't characterize my opinions.
If I am asked my gender, I say "male" because in most cases, biological sex is what's really most relevant. I choose to wear "male" clothing because they were designed with people with male sex characteristics in mind, and they fit and look best on me. On a couple occasions, I've worn "female" clothing because I'm below average size, and they fit better than anything else available at the time. I use Pantene shampoo because it works well for my hair. Sometimes I get called "ma'am" at drive-thrus and on the phone. I like gardening and baking, STEM subjects, Doris Day, wearing nice clothes, weed, camping - I'm emotionally cold and I hate comic books. Who gives a shit?
What gender do I actually "identify" as? I don't. I don't care if people know I'm comfortable (or not) with things that are traditionally viewed as feminine, or that I like things (or not) that are traditionally masculine. People don't need to know if I'm feeling "more feminine" or not at any given moment, let alone whether I do at all, and I don't need a label for myself because why would I? I am just myself. If I want to talk about my interests with someone, I'll just talk about my interests... and if it happens to be something that's at odds with their gendered expectation of me, I'm combating the stigma by defying it without a qualm, as if it were nothing, which it is.
This is a really interesting and illustrative comment for a lot of reasons. As much as you protest against the term "Trans-exclusive radical feminist", your paragraphs hit the talking points of...
Exemplary
This is a really interesting and illustrative comment for a lot of reasons. As much as you protest against the term "Trans-exclusive radical feminist", your paragraphs hit the talking points of so-called "Gender Critical" feminists; that is, you're coming to anti-transness from a feminist lens.
Let's tackle them one by one! First off:
I think attempting to taxonomize the complexities of human behavior and assigning any importance to those classifications is regressive - or at best, a mostly pointless semantic exercise.
I'm not sure how you see that in this thread. Indeed, the OP specifically wanted to talk about that phenomenon - to talk about whether gender is taxonomical (purely descriptive) or not. This is a common GC talking point, though, because it points towards a very common progressive value; most people left of the Westboro Baptist Church on LBGTQ+ issues and feminism would agree with the statement that, as the OP stated, "that manhood or womanhood are infinitely flexible." This particular talking point uses that idea to disparage the concept that naming loose categories of experiences can be beneficial in this space.
I say this especially because you double down on this point in the next paragraph, saying:
Let me be clear, non-conformity of any kind (you know what I mean) is fucking awesome, and I wholeheartedly support anyone that defies society's expectations of them... but I believe, in general, the urge to define one's identity by one's exclusionary differences to others is counterproductive and unhealthy.
This whole section essentially boils down to the common anti-trans trope of, "why can't you just be a masculine woman?" If you're working from the assumption that there are two sexual categories which have rigid and impermeable definitions, and that a person's relationship to these categories is immutable, this makes perfect sense. That is a framework that is both deeply inadequate for describing the human experience, and core to the TERF/GC position.
To dive a little deeper into this, you take a slight left turn and talk about tribalism. You say:
dialog between conflicting tribes becomes so much more difficult because they only see each other in terms of how they disagree, and the battle quickly becomes about - not resolving differences and learning to live and let live - but about defeating the outgroup.
I'm not sure if you're talking about trans people versus GCs/TERFs because your comment is so vague, but this point is often brought up in that context, so I'll go ahead and address it that way. Your analogy is perfectly fine as far as it goes, but it fails to address a key point; one "tribe" is demanding that they be treated with basic dignity, and the other "tribe" is demanding the right not to treat them that way. Yes, there is much vitriol from trans people towards people who want to define trans people out of public life, and the reason for that shouldn't be a mystery to you.
Moving on, let's look at the next paragraph:
Regarding gender, it is contradictory to me when people who believe gender is a social abstraction and matter of personal choice also take it so seriously.
This is a less common talking point these days, partly because it's so transparently ridiculous. In my comment above, I describe gender as dialectical. Paper money is also socially dialectical; that is, paper money is valuable because we say that it's valuable, and we say that it's valuable because we rely on it having value, and expect that others will. Language, too, is entirely socially constructed; there is no "true language", and indeed there can be no language or money without a society to communicate and trade with them.
So too with gender. Gender categories are created by groups of humans as a way to relate to other humans, so they are inherently socially constructed and socially dependent; to say that you must either believe that gender is essential (i.e. not socially constructed) or unimportant is about as meaningful as saying that you have to either believe the United States one dollar bill is inherent to the human species, or else not tip at Starbucks.
Stepping lightly from that trainwreck of a point, we get to the first genuine question I have for you. You say that:
If I am asked my gender, I say "male" because in most cases, biological sex is what's really most relevant.
Frankly, I don't understand this at all. Who is asking you your gender that really wants to know your assigned sex at birth? Certainly some medical services do this, although they should not (see note 1); but, what other situations are you getting into where someone says, "are you a man?" and means "were you born with a penis of the length considered normative for male babies?" I'd appreciate some clarification on this, because as it stands it seems prima facie nonsensical.
And now on to my favorite point!
What gender do I actually "identify" as? I don't.
This is a contradiction. Just a few sentences ago, you said that you identify as male when asked. "Identify" is not a magic word that means "pretends to be, like one of those crazy trannies." It literally just means, when asked, what do you say? I "identify" as female, Jewish, and Midwestern, because when somebody asks for my gender, religion, and regional origin that's what I say. I also "identify" as a software engineer, because when the IRS asks me what I do for a living, that's what I write down.
Moving deeper into this paragraph, you're really hitting the highlights. Specifically, you talk about how you don't need a label, because if someone asks you about your interests, you'll just talk about them and not care if people think they don't match your gender. This is fascinating because you've managed to make and refute the core TERF talking point in, like, three sentences! You say it shouldn't matter if people think of you as preferring to be seen as masculine or feminine:
I don't care if people know I'm comfortable (or not) with things that are traditionally viewed as feminine, or that I like things (or not) that are traditionally masculine.
and then you acknolwedge that the way society categorizes people into gendered boxes sometimes has consequences:
if it happens to be something that's at odds with their gendered expectation of me, I'm combating the stigma
(this is not what "stigma" means. but fine.)
If we lived in a society where gender labels didn't matter at all, we probably wouldn't have people clamoring to change their gender labels, but that's simply not the reality we live in. We don't have a single "clothes" section at Target, we don't have gender equity in STEM fields, and little boys who wear dresses do, in fact, get their asses beat on the playground. Trans people are a result of the human brain's proclivity for self expression attempting to square itself with a world that is deeply repressive towards some forms of that expression.
Overall, you misunderstood the thread, went on a whirlwind tour of TERF ideology, and then had the audacity to tell us not to call you a TERF. That's fine; you can be a garden-variety transphobe if you'd prefer.
If your eyes glazed over for all that, let me tackle one salient point. This comment brings up the issue of "who even needs labels??" repeatedly, and it's a common discussion in queer spaces. The answer, however, is simple. Like all language, labels help us communicate.
I call myself "transfeminine" in my comment because it associates me with a pretty broad category of experience but still makes clear some of my biases. It is narrower than transgender but broader than, say, "binary trans woman"; I could mean that I'm a nonbinary person who is feminizing my voice and growing out my hair, for example.
Why, as minorities, would we want to be able to express our experiences this way? That's also a pretty simple one - we need to be able to find each other! Queerness is a reverse diaspora; without reaching out to other people like us, we have no shared culture, no history, and no ability to protect, uplift, and advocate for each other or ourselves.
Ultimately, I do agree with one thing /u/mono said: labels we apply to each other should never be bounding boxes. Labels are useful when we want to describe a category of experience, but in using labels we have to take into account the boundary conditions, the borderlands, the permeability of the membrane.
The depth and breadth of human experience does not and never has fit into the binary boxes of "male" and "female", and anyone who wants to shove us into those boxes or cut off the ones who don't fit can choke on a cactus.
Notes
Note 1: I worked in precision cancer technology for some time, and confusion between "biologically female" and "has a uterus" caused us no end of problems, without any trans issues coming into play at all. Not all cisgender women have all of the characteristics we generally assign to that group, e.g. because many people have had hysterectomies, mastectomies, etc. for various reasons, so asking about "biological sex" when what you mean is "do you have this organ/hormone mix/expression of secondary sex characteristics" is wrong often enough to be basically useless in precision medicine.
Fundamentally, from my point of view as a transfeminine American, this all comes back to the idea that gender is socially constructed. It is socially dependent and entirely defined by the social interactions around it; a society with no connection to our own would develop its own gender roles, and indeed this is a topic that is studied heavily in anthropology.
Some of what gender constitutes in our, and other, societies is descriptive. Because gender as we have it today is highly correlated with sex, gender roles originally stemmed from normative sexual traits; height differences, ability to build muscle, etc. However, social understandings of these traits, and especially the ways in which our biological urge to find desireable mates have been exploited by various social orders, have made gender more or less prescriptive at various times in history.
Thanks to the triumphs of 20th century feminism, we find ourselves in a position where women are legally able to do anything men are in many jurisdictions (though, of course, gender discrimination remains a serious concern). Social pressures, however, often proscribe (that is, apply a negative prescriptive pressure) to women entering certain lines of work, for example. For many people, a bias against femininity and towards masculinity still guides much of their unconscious thinking - even people who are committed feminists! However, openly expressing these attitudes is pretty uncommon in most social circles - that is, there is a social proscription against the explicit social proscription of women taking on men's roles.
However, these descriptive categories are also deployed prescriptively by society to, for example, delineate "wearing dresses" and "doing housework" as, to varying degrees, outside of acceptable masculinity. While it is socially unacceptable in many social circles to, say, tell off a woman for wearing a suit or a button-down and jeans, it is much more often acceptable to tell off or explicitly disparage a man for doing traditionally feminine activities, even within progressive spaces.
This is one reason we see that, while numbers of out trans men are increasing, they remain lower than the numbers of trans women. It is easier to be a masculine woman than to be a feminine man, at least in most of Western society.
There are a lot of other factors here; trans men, for instance, tend to have more gender-confirming surgeries, because while trans women can often alter their secondary sexual characteristics with hormones alone (there's a reason estradiol tablets are called "titty skittles"), trans men cannot. Obvious breasts are often enough to mark someone as "female" in the eyes of most of society, and binding long-term can be harmful to cardiovascular health.
So, basically, I would say that gender is dialectical. Society uses gender categories to describe the activities of individuals in a set of broad groups, but then uses limited cues to group people into those categories and prescriptively punishes people for not "correctly" fitting the various stereotypes they have for the categories they have assigned.
As to non-binary gender identities, I think @teaearlgraycold said this best:
If you find the expectations society places on you because of the gender you have been assigned incongruous and you recognize that gender is a dialectical construction, you have two options: either embracing it as essential and rejecting its dialectical nature, which is what TERFs and many regressive trans people do ("gender is sex and sex is binary" on the one hand, and "gender is not sex but gender is binary" on the other), or completely rejecting it as a concept (and, optionally, rebuilding it from scratch in your particular subculture). Agender people, many people who identify simply as "nonbinary", and many genderfluid people are at this point; their social circles do not proscribe gender-nonconforming behavior strongly enough to override their human urge to do whatever the fuck they want.
Personally, I think this is what makes gender exploration such a journey. Gender is deeply tied into our society, and accepting that "male" and "female" are meaningful-but-arbitrary categories with strong-but-arbitrary expectations placed on people that fall into them means reconstructing your whole worldview. Some people come out of that wanting to opt out entirely. Some people want to stick with the gender they were originally assigned, but with a deeper understanding of it. And some people, myself included, have decided that the other binary gender is "good enough", and a hell of a lot better than the original model, and go down the binary trans route.
I recognize this is a long post, and I hope it's useful. To get back to the specific question you asked, though, let's examine this paragraph:
Gender is meaningful only as it helps us relate to other people in society. My answer to this is simple - do whatever the fuck you want, and call yourself whatever the fuck you want. Be a guy who wears dresses. Be nonbinary but don't alter your gender presentation at all. Transition like a binary trans woman but keep your gender marker and name. Call yourself different names on different days. If your friends can put up with it, come up with a set of pronouns that feel fun and interesting to you. (One of my very good friends use fae/fem/faer as a pronoun set, pronounced like "they" with an f instead of a þ sound.) Who cares? Humans made the whole thing up, and none of them have more authority over your behavior than you.
What I think you're touching upon here is best described by Simone de Beauvoir as "The Other". What makes a man a man is a rigid rule set, and is "superior" to anything else, and if you don't abide by these rules, you are now an "other". Why do feminine men, trans men, etc. get called women as an insult? Because they are not masculine, they are others, just like women. de Beauvoir's whole idea is if you aren't a man you're just the other gender, and their is no female gender. It makes sense too, anyone can like the color blue, but liking pink isn't masculine, so if a man likes it they are now "women". Same goes for jeans /dresses etc. and anything that seems like there is a double standard for. Reading The Second Sex was incredibly helpful to understand just some of the social stuff with gender.
Cis gay guy here.
Early in the pandemic I was buying comfort clothing for home wear, and I found a nice pajama robe. It was all one piece and hung loosely around me, roughly down to my knees. It was super cozy and super comfortable, and I wore it around my house with delight.
It wasn't until I stepped outside that I suddenly felt uncomfortable about it. I took my dog out to go to the bathroom one morning while wearing it, and I realized that the construction of the item very much made it read more as a "dress" than a "pajama robe". I remember standing in my backyard, weirdly conscious of how I looked and whether or not my neighbors were looking at me through their windows.
My queer reflex of "fuck with gender norms; don't give a shit about people who will judge you" kicked in, and I tried to adopt a sort of "let them stare!" attitude about it. Unfortunately, no matter how much I intellectualized the moment and reminded myself that I believe that anyone should be allowed to wear whatever they like free from judgment, I couldn't shake the feeling that I, genuinely and honestly, was put off by the idea of other people seeing me in what they perceived to be a dress.
I don't have a strong sense of gender identity in myself. I don't know what it means to be "male" and I have the hardest time condensing that down into a standard or a rule in any meaningful way. I think it would be easy for me to just say gender isn't real and anyone can do whatever they want.
But, standing in my backyard, I was hyper-aware of the fact that I didn't want to be seen in what could be perceived as women's attire. I do think there was a tiny bit of that rooted in a fear of judgment, but there was a much bigger part of it that was just this odd and deep-seated feeling of dissonance. The "dress" was communicating something about me that wasn't true -- it was saying something to my neighbors that I didn't want it to say.
I loved wearing the pajamas in my home not because they felt like a "dress" but just because they were comfortable, and I think part of that comfort came from the fact that the pajamas weren't communicating anything to anyone. I wasn't wearing them as a dialogue with myself, and my husband wasn't reading anything into them besides "kfwyre likes spending time in a soft wearable blanket". Stepping outside in those clothes, however, was a way of starting a dialogue (whether I wanted to or not), and I didn't like what the pajamas would "say" about me. It was communication I wasn't in control of, and it felt like I was telling the world something inaccurate.
I think I felt, in that moment, the tiniest, smallest smidgen of what many trans people feel nearly constantly. For the trans people I know in real life, being seen as and affirmed for their gender is like oxygen. To be without it is suffocating. I was uncomfortable with just five minutes of dissonance, standing in my backyard where probably nobody else even saw me anyway, but the trans people I know have had to live in that dissonance, inescapably, for years, in nearly every setting of their lives.
I think if we deconstruct gender too much, or go all nihilistic with it, we run the risk of invalidating their experiences. I think doing so can take away a method of communication for people who very much need to be heard in that way.
Sarah McBride conveys it better than I can in Tomorrow Will Be Different. She talks about coming out to her parents as a trans woman and tries to convey to them not just the label itself, but what it means and represents for her as a person:
Thinking about gender in this way was transformative for me — her framing of it as a “homesickness” made me cry — but it's also an incomplete picture. For a while this was where my understanding of gender stopped, and I credit nonbinary people (including some amazing community members here -- looking at you @Gaywallet!) for helping me carry my understanding further. If gender is a language and some people need to use it for expression, there are others who don't -- including those who resent being asked to use it at all. Their dissonance is of a different kind -- not a conflict of meanings within a language, but a conflict with the language itself.
Nonbinary actor Asia Kate Dillion has a good quote about this in Visible: Out on Television:
I really like their phrasing of "taking it off", as it helps me visualize being nonbinary as not necesssarily a space "between" genders (though that's also a valid way of being nonbinary) but apart from them.
A way I've started thinking about this is a separate spectrum that goes from "gender fulfillment" to "gender abstention". The "fulfillment" end of the spectrum is people who find satisfaction in using gender as a method of communication about themselves. These people don't have to be trans (though they certainly can be); some cis men and women live in this space too. I was talking with my friend who's a father, and fatherhood has very much pushed him far in the direction of "gender fulfillment". It is how he is a man and how he wants to be seen as one, and it is positive and wonderful and enriching for him.
On the other end of the spectrum is gender abstention -- people who want to opt out of gender entirely and don't necessarily see or understand the value of it as it applies to them. I'm more towards this side myself, and I think it's possible to be in that space without being nonbinary. I can't say why I'm male; I don't feel a particularly strong internal sense that I am male; but I also don't feel any pressing need to, like Asia Kate Dillon did, "take off" a gender identity from myself. In fact, standing in my backyard in what looked like a dress was off-putting to me, so resolving that feeling by later choosing to be seen in male clothes the next time I went out was a tiny step towards the fulfillment side of things, so I don't think I'm fully on the side of abstention, even if I'm much closer to that than the other.
Also, how much of all this is innate versus how much of that is societal is hard to disentangle, and in many ways I feel like I can't isolate either. If I lived in a different culture, it's very likely I'd be on a different part of the spectrum, because gender would mean something different to me and to those around me. It’s also important to me that I don’t diminish the experiences or dignity of those elsewhere on the spectrum. Even if I lean towards gender abstention for myself, I don’t want to impose an abstention on others, especially if they thrive at the fulfillment end. That’s something I want to celebrate and respect in them, just as I hope they‘ll respect my space and not tell me that I’m, say, “not man enough”.
I'll give a major caveat here that this fulfillment <-> abstention spectrum is something I've been mulling over and haven't really talked out with others at all yet (this post is actually the first time I've pulled these thoughts from outside my head into the real world). Also, I'm cis, so it's very likely that I'm missing some important, major stuff in my considerations over this. This framework I just invented has gone through literally no workshopping or stress testing or feedback cycles, so it could all be complete bullshit (and if it is, please let me know -- I'm genuinely open to thoughts on this, especially from our trans and nonbinary users here). I'm sharing it here simply because it's where I'm currently at in my thinking about gender, but I'll readily admit that this is an ongoing process. Much like you, I don't feel like I have answers right now.
You have blown my mind! Gender as a language is such a good way to look at it. I would give you an exemplary label if I hadn't just used one. (So many good comments in this thread!) Tomorrow when I have another one to give you're getting it.
If gender is a language then it's impossible to disentangle personal from societal. Language is how we express ourselves, but it's also inherently tied to society. Even one way communication is a two party affair. It depends on the speaker and the audience (and their idea of each other). It changes based on who we are talking to, including when we are talking to ourselves.
I deeply relate to your story about being seen in what appeared to be a dress. I tried wearing skirts and I was deeply uncomfortable wearing them. I have a purse and I'm completely comfortable carrying it anywhere I go. So some traditionally feminine expression I'm okay with, but not a skirt. Thinking about it as language I think the difference is that the skirt feels loud while the purse feels like a firm but quiet statement. I don't like being loud.
I agree with what you said about this. For some people gender is an important part of how they see and present themselves and others want gender to just leave them alone already, with people everywhere between those extremes.
I would say that the same can be applied to sexual orientation, as well, with a spectrum from "orientation fulfillment" to "orientation abstention". By orientation abstention I don't mean ace or aro. People who are aro/ace can just as strongly identify with that as allosexuals do with their orientation, and get fulfillment out of identifying that way. I'm talking about people that don't strongly identify with an orientation.
I'm on that abstention end of orientation. I don't strongly identify as hetero, homo, bi, or pan. Nor do I really identify with ace or aro. I have tried many times to put labels on myself and they never stick.
For what it's worth many people who have made gender charts typically put male/female on the x axis and strong/weak association on the y axis. In some cases it will just be male on one axis female on the other with affinity increasing in one direction. I think people who've spent a lot of time considering gender consider it to exist on more than just two axes, as if you exist outside the binary you may not find an easy way to place yourself on this chart, but at a basic level I believe placing yourself somewhere towards a pole which represents your identity and somewhere towards a pole which represents how strong that feeling is are two necessary components of mapping any gender.
I have no expertise here in anything other than being a hermit, but acting as a metaphor for life seems pretty fruitful and I'm going to run with it a bit.
All the world's a stage, but maybe some of us care more about role-playing than others. Maybe you have strong opinions about what role you want to play? Others of us might be minimalist about it. You can't help but play some role when you go outside the house, but maybe you're not into acting and you're not looking for applause. You're fine with playing "Generic Customer #5" at the store, as long as you can buy what you need and get off the stage.
Sometimes blending into the background is a goal. Sometimes it's hard. When you walk into a room, does everyone turn and look? Are you okay with that attention? Do you want to be okay with attention?
Playing bit parts and avoiding attention can be lonely, and often they don't pay well. You try out for more. Dates. Job interviews. The spotlight's on you! Can you play a leading role? "Be yourself" they tell you. Which, means, I suppose, playing a role that's very familiar to you and that you're comfortable doing all the time, even under pressure.
Your relationship with an audience's expectations can be fraught, making some roles harder to play than others. What roles do you want to get better at? Do you want to play against type or not? Maybe some environments make you uncomfortable, because you don't see any role for you to play there. Maybe there is a role, but you don't want to play the stranger, the tourist, the foreigner, or worse.
Some people are going to be more skillful actors than others. Sometimes they slip. I think most of us here would say you should be tolerant, going along with others' intent. Maybe the most comfortable place to be is where everyone knows you're playing a difficult role, that you might slip, but that's okay, you can try again. A forgiving, nurturing audience for struggling actors.
But an audience can be wicked when they see someone playing a role that they don't think they have a right to play. They see a phony. A shill. Maybe a spy? How do you do, fellow kids? Maybe they paid for these tickets and are expecting competence, good service! Exposing the imposter seems like justice. It's a trope.
What does authenticity mean, other than knowing your role so well, being so skilled at it, that nobody thinks to question your right to play it?
I think it might be fruitful to talk about gender roles with all of the above in mind, but it's probably better if someone else does it, so I'll stop here.
Hey there. I feel similarly. My conclusion is that gender is an illusion that some of us can’t return to once we realize its fickle nature. I have no interest in breaking that illusion for the many people that apply it in a healthy manner to their lives. Just like how I have no interest in turning a kind theist into an atheist. The world in many ways is better off with religion. There are a minority of people that use religion to do more harm than good.
The same goes for gender. If a person sees themselves as a man and they use that idea to reinforce good traits they see in themselves and that makes them happy then I’m glad they feel masculine, male gendered, etc. The same goes for a person that feels they are a woman.
In the collective idea of gender each role in the binary has positive traits. We talk a lot of toxic masculinity but there are positive aspects of the masculine archetype. Protecting people you love, having a strong body. These should not be exclusively owned by men. Men can also give a toxic twist to these traits - but any virtue can be perverted.
I don’t consider myself non-binary for the same reason I don’t quite consider myself non-religious or completely outside of the world of sports fans. I was raised under the Quaker religion and I continue to enjoy most of what the religion has to offer - but I think there is no chance that there’s a higher power like the Bible describes. And trying to define what a higher power could still be once that proposal is off the table isn’t worth my thought. I do actually go to a Phillies game or two per year and feel somewhat invested in the team so if I feel like being a sports fan I’m a sports fan for that day.
I’m not sure if there’s a better classification for people like me. Non binary isn’t right. I’m more so just gender agnostic. When forced to given an answer male is the best fit. But like how I don’t attend religious services very often - gender’s just not a mode of thought I put myself into very often.
I want to get to the point where I'm gender agnostic/apathetic. Society and the ideas ingrained in my head make it hard.
Religiously, I'm an apatheist. I don't consider myself an agnostic because I'm certain there's no higher power (at least not one that matches anything humans have thought up). But I'm at a point where I kind of don't care. I don't need to spend any energy considering the question anymore. To get to this point I had to go through a period where I thought a lot about it and cared very much.
I want to get to a point where I feel about gender the same way I currently feel about religion: That I don't care and I don't think about it. But I'm not there yet.
Not to force you into a box or tell you that you should or shouldn't use a specific label, but what's wrong with the label 'gender agnostic'? I rather like the ring of it.
I'm not sure what you mean - I literally say "I’m more so just gender agnostic".
Oh I guess I just read it with a similar tone to the paragraph before where you talk about how you don't consider yourself non-binary or non-religious, apologies... mostly want to say I vibe with the existence of that label and celebrate its use
No worries. I can see how you'd read it like that.
My personal sensibilities and views about gender is that it is both prescriptive and descriptive if you separate it into components, and is especially different in what is internally determined vs externally determined when you separate it. Gender is a role you fill, a performance you put on, an experience you have, a thing other people assign to you, and an identity you assign to yourself. And none of those things are necessarily fixed and can very based on context.
To some degree I think that being homosexual automatically confers a degree of gender non conformity or "non binaryness". So much of gender is built around heterosexual attraction and heterosexual roles. I'm a lesbian and I truly feel like my gender is "lesbian" more than it is "woman". What most people ascribe to the "woman" role and "womanhood" simply don't fit me. Gender non conformity is super common in queer people too and I prefer to dress and present androgynous. My interests and hobbies are both masculine and feminine, and I've been told my typing style is somewhat masculine but my mannerisms IRL are slightly feminine.
On the internet, most of the time, I present as male and I'm gendered as male. In real life, I present as a female bodied person who wears mostly men's clothes and 98% of the time I'm gendered as female by others. In lesbian and wlw circles, I'm not a butch lesbian or a femme lesbian but I'm considered "boyish" or "masculine" to some degree. So my gender experience definitely changes based on context.
There's also the aspect of "transness" itself as a gender, like experiencing dysphoria or doing physical transition things like voice training, hrt, surgery, etc. Some people might classify me as being under the trans umbrella, but in my personal definition I think it would only fit me if I had strong dysphoria or a desire for physical transition.
There are a shitton of different philosophical approaches to the nature of gender, especially in the queer community, and it can be hard to pin down and is definitely a source of a lot of debate! I've got a "live and let live" approach. (I think most of us do). Even if my conception on gender takes into account how outside observers gender me, for some people the main and largest component of their sense of gender is identity and internal experience. These kinds of conversations are fascinating to me so thank you for a good prompt!
I make that quite simple: gender is whatever each individual chooses it to be in respect to themselves. Whatever you tell me you are, whatever meanings "gender" carry to you: I'm fine. I don't need to be convinced.
You can certainly analyze that under some more or less rigorous logic, that is enlightening for some. Gender Trouble was an educational read back in college. But that is not a requirement in my view.
My personal view: gender is something you do. It is neither descriptive or prescriptive: it is performative.
As for myself, I'm a rather typical cis-male. That is what I wish to perform.
This is my favorite thing to see in threads like this, to be honest. More cis people should think seriously about their gender; it's interesting, and there's nothing wrong with landing back where you started with a better understanding of how you relate to society!
I absolutely second the recommendation for Gender Trouble and I'd also like to throw in a rec of just about anything by S. Bear Bergman for anyone interested in a nuanced transmasculine perspective.
I can't give all the credit to Judith Butler. I have a very smart gay friend that taught me a lot. There are things he said without even thinking that I remember to this day. Some people have this ability to make everyone around them smarter without even trying.
One day we were talking about wether someone was gay or not, and he said: "I don't care who you have sex with, in what circumstances, and how many times: if tou tell me you're gay, than you're gay. If you tell me you're not, than you're not". I could feel myself becoming a better person as he spoke.
For some, gender is prescriptive. For others, it's descriptive.
I've never fully understood gender in the same way that I struggle to understand anything that is defined loosely by humans. Language is a great example of something with a loose definition - how many times have you heard someone use a word in a way you didn't expect? For many of these people they've accidentally ended up using the 'wrong' word when they meant to use another. This can be because the 'correct' word didn't show up in their thoughts, or it could be because they were taught that the definition of this word wasn't what the dictionary says it was (and by taught it could have been formally or through their own intuition).
I put 'wrong' and 'correct' in quotes above because if you take a second and step back, what is a word but a communally accepted definition, using other words to define it? Have you ever found it interesting how this is a precarious house of cards? How can you define a word without understanding other words? Perhaps with a gesture, a motion, context, or other cues. At the end of the day, everyone must infer the definitions of the first words they learn, for which they build a castle of meaning upon. At their essence, words are merely the conversion of an abstract idea (a thought) to a concrete idea (a word) and by its very nature some information must be loss when we do this.
Given this information, any definition has some wiggle room. But you've probably naturally reacted a bit concerned about this idea, or at least skeptical. The sky is the sky, it's blue, and we're all on the planet earth - these don't have wiggle room. To an extent, I'd say you are correct - there are words in the world which have much more solid definitions than others. You won't find many people questioning whether there is a sky in a video game but conversely you probably will find people with differing ideas of what constitutes a party. We have a spectrum with words... some we can tie to relatively concrete ideas that are either perceived similarly enough among most humans for agreement, such as visible spectra of color, or are tied to specific enough of circumstances that they hardly get misinterpreted such as pneumonia; and some words are very loosely tied to ideas because humans vary quite a bit and we end up with words like religion and gender.
These latter words, which seem to be defined differently in a very tangible and understandable way simply by asking a group of ten humans what the word means and listening to their answers, are the kind of words that I have had to learn how to compromise with. I do not feel I can ever fully understand them because they do not seem to hold a 'correct' definition to me. In fact, gender is so varied that I legitimately have no words I can say describe gender or are a characteristic of gender. Even thinking within the binary, I can't say that any one profession, character trait, set of ideas, type of action, emotion, or any other word only belongs to people who tell me they are male or female. Outside of the binary it gets even more confusing with modern interpretations of gender including affinity to concepts as simple as "fairy-folk" or as complicated as 'a grand, old piano- painted black, shining, somewhat glossy. Covered in vines holding beautiful, golden flowers, sitting in the middle of a forest; forgotten, yet not lost. A cat sits atop, staring into the distance with a glare in it's tiny marble eyes. The sun lays itself atop the base in streaks, like looking through swaying; almost open blinds'. I find myself rather drawn towards this description in its explicitness, but I've never heard a human describe their gender in either such detail, or such a unique way - it is certainly not what I expected, even in a thread of non-binary individuals explaining their gender.
At the end of the day, the ultimate decider of a words definition and worth is two-fold. Society gets to decide what words are important at any one point in time because humans as a whole decide a word is defined a specific way through conversation about that word; however, each individual human also gets to decide what words are important to them and what they mean. If gender is important to you and defining yourself within the confines of what society tells you gender is are important to you, then it's just a matter of finding the right society to align yourself inside in a way which makes you comfortable and okay with moving on from this consideration of where you fit at the appropriate pace. You may find the need to align yourself with a different society than you normally spend time in, or travel to another society to gather the words and understanding to investigate and ultimately move past this with more knowledge of your own experience and that's perfectly okay! It's a journey and the ultimate goal at the end of this is an understanding of yourself and a better understanding of the experiences of others. Much like a cat presented a cat bed by its owner, you shouldn't feel the need to settle down into the boxes that someone else gives you- reject the cat bed and go find a cardboard box that speaks to your heart, because at the end of the day you're the one laying down to go sleep and you should do it where you feel comfortable, not where someone else tells you that you are comfortable.
You may already know this, but I thought it was amusing that you picked the sky being blue as an example of something that has a solid linguistic definition. In fact, there are a number of languages that don't have a distinct word for blue. Color is a very wobbly thing when it comes to language. I think this actually reinforces your point. Language is pretty imprecise, even when we try very hard to pin it down. Generally the best we can do is try to describe what words commonly mean, and then desperately try to keep track as the usage changes under our noses.
I decided to choose words not as far on one side of the spectrum as words which are ultra-specific and scientific in nature such as pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, because I was hoping the conflict that some would see in these words would further reinforce my point 😉
Personally from an introspective perspective I don't feel like anything when it comes to gender, I can feel tired, hopeful, or a pain in my knee, but I never feel (wo)manly, I don't even know what that would be like. It seems much more like an abstract concept to me, and thus purely intellectual & descriptive. To me your confusion about answering that question doesn't seem indicative to anything, besides being a normal human being.
Something that might be helpful that I don't see discussed much on theses posts I'd like to add is just the most "basic" definition of gender most cis/het people understand, i.e. what's in your pants. Obviously no one ever replies with this, and for good reasons already mentioned, but the one /merit/ to this definition is it's approachable, and more importantly it's a good starting point. It's really easy to get lost in a philosophical train of thought of what does gender mean, what do others expect of me, and all that existential fun stuff. That's not a bad thing, for the most part it's incredibly helpful and interesting thing to think about, but it can be distracting and feel like it won't ever resolve itself (and in someways it won't, you are always changing as a person, and so is culture). The one thing that won't ever change is what body you're most comfortable in, hence the og definition. As you think about these things, just make sure you keep the touchstone of "what body would I be most comfortable in", or really: do you need reassignment surgery. Personally, gender expression and labels are something I think about, but in the same way I think about hobbies, art, what movies/music I like, etc. and I give them the same emotional weight. What I encourage most people to do is the same, don't worry about if you feel your gender expression, labels, etc is changing, it's ok. The single thing that is worth worrying about and giving emotional weight to is if you are comfortable in your body, and if you need "reassignment" surgery. If just thinking about this stresses you out, that's a hint it's worth thinking about more, if not, don't worry about it! Just remember to check in with yourself! As you can tell by the replies gender is an insanely deep topic, and it can seem overwhelming, but seriously, don't let it, it should be fun and an academic/self-expressing venture, realizing you like skirts/jeans/etc. does NOT mean you need to worry about ANYTHING or that you need hormones, surgery, or whatever. The only thing that is worth worrying about is if you don't feel comfortable with your body.
I think attempting to taxonomize the complexities of human behavior and assigning any importance to those classifications is regressive - or at best, a mostly pointless semantic exercise. At worst, it reinforces tribal behavior that, while often supportive and probably necessary in the short-term for minorities at serious risk (given a society that doesn't like change), hinders integration and the resolution of differences long-term.
Let me be clear, non-conformity of any kind (you know what I mean) is fucking awesome, and I wholeheartedly support anyone that defies society's expectations of them... but I believe, in general, the urge to define one's identity by one's exclusionary differences to others is counterproductive and unhealthy. It's a symptom of harmful social pressures, not a solution to them. Tribes are formed along those differentiations, dialog between conflicting tribes becomes so much more difficult because they only see each other in terms of how they disagree, and the battle quickly becomes about - not resolving differences and learning to live and let live - but about defeating the outgroup. Even if the other tribe is totally unjustified, forming one counter to them hands them a label with which they can and will assign whatever meaning fits their prejudices and that they'll use as a substitute instead of actually considering their shared humanity. Likewise, a well-intentioned and morally substantiated tribe can trivialize and/or mischaracterize their antagonists' motivations and reasons for being the way they are, distracting from the fundamental problems that need to be addressed.
Regarding gender, it is contradictory to me when people who believe gender is a social abstraction and matter of personal choice also take it so seriously. If the semantics of the gender labels is arbitrary, they have no utility as a standard with which people can describe themselves. If you try to define a standard, you're inevitably going to marginalize people who don't fit the model. If you try to define a label for every "misfit," your standard is gonna be a huge mess that takes more effort to use than just explaining whatever specific characteristics matter most. And then, even for the people who do fit the model, whether they're cis or not, by identifying with the gender that they relate to most, they're necessarily reinforcing the notion that the labels have some concrete or social meaning and that they matter. If I'm considered a TERF for that... fuck, I wouldn't even know how to respond because that's often an emotionally charged pejorative whose denotation doesn't characterize my opinions.
If I am asked my gender, I say "male" because in most cases, biological sex is what's really most relevant. I choose to wear "male" clothing because they were designed with people with male sex characteristics in mind, and they fit and look best on me. On a couple occasions, I've worn "female" clothing because I'm below average size, and they fit better than anything else available at the time. I use Pantene shampoo because it works well for my hair. Sometimes I get called "ma'am" at drive-thrus and on the phone. I like gardening and baking, STEM subjects, Doris Day, wearing nice clothes, weed, camping - I'm emotionally cold and I hate comic books. Who gives a shit?
What gender do I actually "identify" as? I don't. I don't care if people know I'm comfortable (or not) with things that are traditionally viewed as feminine, or that I like things (or not) that are traditionally masculine. People don't need to know if I'm feeling "more feminine" or not at any given moment, let alone whether I do at all, and I don't need a label for myself because why would I? I am just myself. If I want to talk about my interests with someone, I'll just talk about my interests... and if it happens to be something that's at odds with their gendered expectation of me, I'm combating the stigma by defying it without a qualm, as if it were nothing, which it is.
This is a really interesting and illustrative comment for a lot of reasons. As much as you protest against the term "Trans-exclusive radical feminist", your paragraphs hit the talking points of so-called "Gender Critical" feminists; that is, you're coming to anti-transness from a feminist lens.
Let's tackle them one by one! First off:
I'm not sure how you see that in this thread. Indeed, the OP specifically wanted to talk about that phenomenon - to talk about whether gender is taxonomical (purely descriptive) or not. This is a common GC talking point, though, because it points towards a very common progressive value; most people left of the Westboro Baptist Church on LBGTQ+ issues and feminism would agree with the statement that, as the OP stated, "that manhood or womanhood are infinitely flexible." This particular talking point uses that idea to disparage the concept that naming loose categories of experiences can be beneficial in this space.
I say this especially because you double down on this point in the next paragraph, saying:
This whole section essentially boils down to the common anti-trans trope of, "why can't you just be a masculine woman?" If you're working from the assumption that there are two sexual categories which have rigid and impermeable definitions, and that a person's relationship to these categories is immutable, this makes perfect sense. That is a framework that is both deeply inadequate for describing the human experience, and core to the TERF/GC position.
To dive a little deeper into this, you take a slight left turn and talk about tribalism. You say:
I'm not sure if you're talking about trans people versus GCs/TERFs because your comment is so vague, but this point is often brought up in that context, so I'll go ahead and address it that way. Your analogy is perfectly fine as far as it goes, but it fails to address a key point; one "tribe" is demanding that they be treated with basic dignity, and the other "tribe" is demanding the right not to treat them that way. Yes, there is much vitriol from trans people towards people who want to define trans people out of public life, and the reason for that shouldn't be a mystery to you.
Moving on, let's look at the next paragraph:
This is a less common talking point these days, partly because it's so transparently ridiculous. In my comment above, I describe gender as dialectical. Paper money is also socially dialectical; that is, paper money is valuable because we say that it's valuable, and we say that it's valuable because we rely on it having value, and expect that others will. Language, too, is entirely socially constructed; there is no "true language", and indeed there can be no language or money without a society to communicate and trade with them.
So too with gender. Gender categories are created by groups of humans as a way to relate to other humans, so they are inherently socially constructed and socially dependent; to say that you must either believe that gender is essential (i.e. not socially constructed) or unimportant is about as meaningful as saying that you have to either believe the United States one dollar bill is inherent to the human species, or else not tip at Starbucks.
Stepping lightly from that trainwreck of a point, we get to the first genuine question I have for you. You say that:
Frankly, I don't understand this at all. Who is asking you your gender that really wants to know your assigned sex at birth? Certainly some medical services do this, although they should not (see note 1); but, what other situations are you getting into where someone says, "are you a man?" and means "were you born with a penis of the length considered normative for male babies?" I'd appreciate some clarification on this, because as it stands it seems prima facie nonsensical.
And now on to my favorite point!
This is a contradiction. Just a few sentences ago, you said that you identify as male when asked. "Identify" is not a magic word that means "pretends to be, like one of those crazy trannies." It literally just means, when asked, what do you say? I "identify" as female, Jewish, and Midwestern, because when somebody asks for my gender, religion, and regional origin that's what I say. I also "identify" as a software engineer, because when the IRS asks me what I do for a living, that's what I write down.
Moving deeper into this paragraph, you're really hitting the highlights. Specifically, you talk about how you don't need a label, because if someone asks you about your interests, you'll just talk about them and not care if people think they don't match your gender. This is fascinating because you've managed to make and refute the core TERF talking point in, like, three sentences! You say it shouldn't matter if people think of you as preferring to be seen as masculine or feminine:
and then you acknolwedge that the way society categorizes people into gendered boxes sometimes has consequences:
(this is not what "stigma" means. but fine.)
If we lived in a society where gender labels didn't matter at all, we probably wouldn't have people clamoring to change their gender labels, but that's simply not the reality we live in. We don't have a single "clothes" section at Target, we don't have gender equity in STEM fields, and little boys who wear dresses do, in fact, get their asses beat on the playground. Trans people are a result of the human brain's proclivity for self expression attempting to square itself with a world that is deeply repressive towards some forms of that expression.
Overall, you misunderstood the thread, went on a whirlwind tour of TERF ideology, and then had the audacity to tell us not to call you a TERF. That's fine; you can be a garden-variety transphobe if you'd prefer.
If your eyes glazed over for all that, let me tackle one salient point. This comment brings up the issue of "who even needs labels??" repeatedly, and it's a common discussion in queer spaces. The answer, however, is simple. Like all language, labels help us communicate.
I call myself "transfeminine" in my comment because it associates me with a pretty broad category of experience but still makes clear some of my biases. It is narrower than transgender but broader than, say, "binary trans woman"; I could mean that I'm a nonbinary person who is feminizing my voice and growing out my hair, for example.
Why, as minorities, would we want to be able to express our experiences this way? That's also a pretty simple one - we need to be able to find each other! Queerness is a reverse diaspora; without reaching out to other people like us, we have no shared culture, no history, and no ability to protect, uplift, and advocate for each other or ourselves.
Ultimately, I do agree with one thing /u/mono said: labels we apply to each other should never be bounding boxes. Labels are useful when we want to describe a category of experience, but in using labels we have to take into account the boundary conditions, the borderlands, the permeability of the membrane.
The depth and breadth of human experience does not and never has fit into the binary boxes of "male" and "female", and anyone who wants to shove us into those boxes or cut off the ones who don't fit can choke on a cactus.
Notes
Note 1: I worked in precision cancer technology for some time, and confusion between "biologically female" and "has a uterus" caused us no end of problems, without any trans issues coming into play at all. Not all cisgender women have all of the characteristics we generally assign to that group, e.g. because many people have had hysterectomies, mastectomies, etc. for various reasons, so asking about "biological sex" when what you mean is "do you have this organ/hormone mix/expression of secondary sex characteristics" is wrong often enough to be basically useless in precision medicine.