Why do we even have gender?

[Autumnwindinthewillows]

Excuse my ignorance - only recently learning about all this.
Given that sex is biologically determined why do we also have a gender? I could possibly understand the point in a language that denotes all nouns male or female but as a purely social construct can't we just do away with it and call ourselves what we want?

Sounds good to me

Welcome to radical feminism

Good question.

IMO gender is the system by which men (as a class) oppress women and women internalise that oppression. There is otherwise no point to it at all, it just restricts us. That's why many women won't call themselves cis, as we don't identify with something that enforces our oppression.

Why not? Sick of all this 'they' nonsense. FFS.

Couldn’t agree more OP.

A huge issue is that so many people use the words sex and gender interchangeably.

To me. Sex is biology, binary, fact, unchangeable.

To me. Gender, reads ‘gender stereotype’, cultural, associated with sex loosely, cannot be defined. Wearing, acting, doing something that is stereotypically male or female, does not mean you change sex. E.g. I wear trousers Monday’s, dressses on tuesdays, like stem subjects, doesn’t mean i’m A man on Mondays.

This is the whole point of feminism.

It's baffling, isn't it. I just don't understand why more people can't see that gender is the problem. There is no innate attraction of female people to pink, sparkly clothes and long hair and makeup, and of male people to khaki, tractors and a stiff upper lip. It's all socialised. I'm in my late 50s and remember so clearly that in the 60s when I was young lots of little girls had short hair because it was easy to look after. Toys were nothing like as gendered as they are now. Of course there were some toys that little boys were not expected to play with, sadly, but there were plenty of unisex toys. The great sea of pink and blue that you see in children's clothes departments and toyshops was not there in the 1960s or 70s, in my experience. The idea that you might buy a pink pram for a girl and then buy a blue one to replace it if your second child was a boy would have been absolutely batshit! Nobody had the money to do that. A nice functional navy did for all the children.

But to answer your question, the reason we have gender is to justify and perpetuate patriarchal oppression, to put it simply.

Control of women's bodies/fertility, so heirs can be produced and land/property/titles passed on. Among the ordinary classes, lots more humans could be produced so they could become the farm workers, builders, soldiers, shipbuilders, miners, foresters etc etc... necessary to contribute to the project of building empire and civilisation. Society needed to be structured in such a way that women could be controlled and subordinate. Gender is that hierarchical structuring.

Social contract, I suppose. We need to mate, and attract mates, and establish our place in society, in a hierarchy, etc - therefore we display signals to show we are attractive, available, fertile, virile, etc.

Others may well have more eloquent ways of explaining it; my take on it pretty much imagines us as slightly complicated gorillas. That sometimes get into enormously complicated signalling situations involving bananas.

Gender is kind of like race. Your sex and your skin colour just are, whereas gender and race is more about the assumptions / restrictions /expectations placed on you by society / other people / yourself because of these biological characteristics.

So it's not that easy to do away with as it's not something we individually choose.

I am relatively new to all of this though, so I could be wrong.

Autumn May I gift you this beautiful film

Just showed 13 yo DD the video. She liked it, ‘but what does it mean?’.

It was difficult trying to break it down in simple terms, when my head had been scrambled with the double speak, jargon and mental gymnastics of this trans stuff. So hastily, I came up with..

It means just try to be free to be yourself. Don’t let anyone tell you what you should or should not do just because you are a girl.
‘You don’t have to wear pink if you don’t want to.’
‘I hate pink’
‘You can cut all your hair off like a boy if you want’
‘But I like my hair long’
‘And that’s fine because you want to keep it long’

I previously asked her to let me know if the teachers (or outside TRAs) cover this topic at school, so she asked who are these trans people were (so she could be on guard not be get indoctrinated), and I said sometimes they come into schools, sometimes they produce posters and materials for teachers to deliver in schools.

‘Why are they so anger?’
‘I think it’s like cognitive dissonance.....do you know what cognitive dissonance is? It’s like a child can get very upset and angry when they have always been told about Father Christmas and have always believed in F.C., and then someone comes along and tell them the truth, and burst their bubble, they can’t handle it...’

I don’t know, is there an element of cognitive dissonance in all this.
That’s how I’m making sense of the madness at the moment.

Another thing im trying to understand is. How the F did these TRAs get so powerful?
By hijacking the fundamental definitions and sowing confusion?
Who funds them?

I’ve heard that in America its the companies that make millions off the surgery and drugs involved in the movement such as those owned by George Soros et al. I do appreciate that in this country they are trying to make it so you don’t have to have the drugs and surgery (unless you are a child)

Toys were nothing like as gendered as they are now

Hmm not convinced by that. I'm the same age as you. Mecanno sets and train sets were strictly for boys as was Scalextric and Subbuteo. The idea of giving a doll or a toy pram or a skipping rope or a bead set to a boy would have been unthinkable.

Lego and Spirograph were for both but beyond that sorry I don't recall this wonderful gender- neutral world of the 1960s and 70s. At school girls got sewing, knitting and cooking and boys got technical drawing. I recall this irritated my mother but as all of these were non-academic subjects I wouldn't be doing after first year of secondary she didn't pursue it. As it was my careers advisor in 5th year suggested languages rather than law (I ignored him)

I think the concept of gender, as different to sex, was very useful to second wave feministsand the social sciences, when the idea that biology does not determine interests, personality, abilities etc. first took off.

When gender was used as a concept to e.g. point to gendered socialisation, on the basis of sex, this was quite extraordinary, in a world that considered womens role in society as a biological destiny.

But back then, it was obviously used to explain how gendered expectations were holding women back, as a class, and the whole point of the concept was that it characterised social phenomena, as specifically opposed to something innate.

Now that TRAs are turning it back into an innate property, while obviously completely overlooking the shittier, unpaid labour, aspects of womanhood, and using it to undermine the understanding of gender as a hierarchy and women as a class, it is arguably time to retire the concept.

Although, having said that, I think we do need a term to denote those social aspects that many people of one sex have in common, such as the sense of entitlement many men assume in many interactions, even when they are not aware of it. That is clearly not biologically but socially constructed, so it is useful to have a concept to apply to all those socialised aspects that follow having a particular kind of sexed body.

Lass I always wanted a Scalextric but never got one.

I agree that toys were gendered, but perhaps just not quite so much in a very overtly marketed wall of pink or blue.

I think our clothes weren't quite so girly either, and we didn't all have long hair.

But I was a tomboy and wanted to be a boy because I wanted to do "boy" things so there definitely was some difference.

ThePrincipal Wearing, acting, doing something that is stereotypically male or female, does not mean you change sex. E.g. I wear trousers Monday’s, dressses on tuesdays, like stem subjects, doesn’t mean i’m A man on Mondays.

And yet that is Philip Bunce's whole premise and he won a fucking award for being such a good woman.

Yes, I was a child in the 70s and it was very gendered in terms of yours, clothing and expectations of behaviour.

It just wasn’t quite as “in your face” commercial, with the intensely gendered advertising of pink and blue and the abundance of plastic crap.

Yours= toys

I agree too that we have always had 'boy' toys and 'girl' toys. What you get now though is every toy in blue or pink. Vtech are especially bad for this.

I had toy cars, I climbed trees, had short hair, chose to wear the boys uniform at school so got called a boy by teachers and students. I'm female, just an ornaray twat who saw that being male was more advantageous so I basically played at being one. I'm an engineer now, have worked in traditionally male environments most of my life. Playing male would probably make me trans these days. I wish we'd moved on instead of backwards. Gender can fuck right off in my view, I genuinely believe it helps no-one and gives.me the rage. Why not fight to demolish these ridiculous stereotypes rather than enshrine them in legislation?!?

Before being transgender became a fad we were moving towards gender neutral ideology. Shops where finally listening that we didn’t want aisles of pink sparkles labelled girls stuff and action men for boys toys etc.
But now everyone’s jumped on the transgender bandwagon all the focus is on gender and if you are a man who likes to wear lipstick and sparkles then that makes you a woman regardless of what’s in your knickers and is does nothing for females who do not what to be associated with lipstick and sparkles.

Before being transgender became a fad we were moving towards gender neutral ideology. Shops where finally listening that we didn’t want aisles of pink sparkles labelled girls stuff and action men for boys toys etc.

Going further back from that, the deregulation of advertising to children and subsequent increase of adverts and screen time targeting children, along with the rise of the big brands and their aggressive “lifestyle” advertising led to the massive pink / blue segregation.

But yes, transgenderism has pushed back any progress made by campaigns such as “let toys be toys” because it reinforced the binary that feminism was trying to get away from.