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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

See all MNHQ comments on this thread

So what exactly is gender?

184 replies

XChrome · 08/10/2024 21:14

I'm still waiting for [redacted], to explain in depth what gender is. According to many people, it's a feeling, a self-perception, which they are labelling as gender. My question would be; how do the people who are using this label for a feeling know that the label they are giving it is accurate? How do they know it's not just the result of being socialized into believing certain feelings or interests signify that one is the gender that society has deemed corresponds to those feelings and interests?
I genuinely want to know, because I have never had this feeling in my life. I can perceive only my biological sex. I have always regarded my self-perception as the result of my individual personality and experiences, not about either gender or biological sex. However, many of those experiences are sex specific, so biological sex does play into it in that sense.

Can anybody answer this question about what gender is? Can you describe the feeling and explain how you know what it signifies? Please note that this is not a goading post. I'm not looking for an argument, just an explanation.
Thanks.

[Post edited by MNHQ to remove tag]

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HipTightOnions · 08/10/2024 21:21

Good question. There is never a meaningful answer.

According to many people, it's a feeling, a self-perception, which they are labelling as gender.

A feeling of what though? A self-perception of what?

I mentally translate "gender" (in its recent use) to "the sex someone wants to be perceived as" but I don't think that would necessarily go down well.

Helleofabore · 08/10/2024 21:24

Looking forward to a coherent answer OP. One that doesn’t resort to stereotypes to categorise identities.

Good luck.

HipTightOnions · 08/10/2024 21:26

The only vaguely sensible answer I have heard was in terms of archetypes, so that someone who claims to have the gender "woman" aspires to a particular societal archetype.

What does that archetype consist of though? No answer was forthcoming!

Circumferences · 08/10/2024 21:30

I wouldn't usually grab an AI summary on a thread, but interestingly this is what it pulls up

So what exactly is gender?
XChrome · 08/10/2024 21:30

HipTightOnions · 08/10/2024 21:21

Good question. There is never a meaningful answer.

According to many people, it's a feeling, a self-perception, which they are labelling as gender.

A feeling of what though? A self-perception of what?

I mentally translate "gender" (in its recent use) to "the sex someone wants to be perceived as" but I don't think that would necessarily go down well.

Yeah, it baffles me as to what else it could be other than what one wants to be perceived as and wants to perceive oneself as. I do make room for the possibility that as it's something I've never experienced, I just don't understand.

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Ohfuckrucksack · 08/10/2024 21:33

Gender is a societal construct, that consists of a set of culturally specific rules that create expectations for each sex. The expectations are comprehensive looking at all aspects of each sex's lives - including behaviour, appearance and clothing, occupation, responsibilities and more.

XChrome · 08/10/2024 21:38

Circumferences · 08/10/2024 21:30

I wouldn't usually grab an AI summary on a thread, but interestingly this is what it pulls up

My paraphrase of ChatGPT's definition of gender would be; "If you like playing with dollies and dressing up, that's your gender, even if your birth certificate doesn't agree."

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Ohfuckrucksack · 08/10/2024 21:39

I have no issues with sticking two fingers up to cultural expectations that are placed upon me - always have done.

Gender ideology adherents don't have the courage to do this though - instead they place expectations on everyone else to lie and pretend that down is up and wrong is right.

Circumferences · 08/10/2024 21:39

Exactly. Gender is socially constructed, so a concept that can move around, evolve and change in between cultures and timeframe.

Sex on the other hand is material reality.

Gender is basically feminine or masculine stereotypes. Try getting gender ideologists to admit that though.... As you say

XChrome · 08/10/2024 21:41

Ohfuckrucksack · 08/10/2024 21:33

Gender is a societal construct, that consists of a set of culturally specific rules that create expectations for each sex. The expectations are comprehensive looking at all aspects of each sex's lives - including behaviour, appearance and clothing, occupation, responsibilities and more.

That has always been what I considered it to be, rendering it meaningless to me personally.
Not that I've escaped the consequences of the fact that others consider it meaningful, though. Far from it.

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HipTightOnions · 08/10/2024 21:42

Gender is a societal construct, that consists of a set of culturally specific rules that create expectations for each sex.

But that isn't something a person can "have", so presumably people who claim to have gender (identities) mean something different?

XChrome · 08/10/2024 21:43

HipTightOnions · 08/10/2024 21:26

The only vaguely sensible answer I have heard was in terms of archetypes, so that someone who claims to have the gender "woman" aspires to a particular societal archetype.

What does that archetype consist of though? No answer was forthcoming!

Probably because they knew the answer would be blatantly sexist and you'd shoot it down.

OP posts:
HipTightOnions · 08/10/2024 21:44

Circumferences · 08/10/2024 21:30

I wouldn't usually grab an AI summary on a thread, but interestingly this is what it pulls up

What a pity that's complete gibberish though!

TWETMIRF · 08/10/2024 21:46

I think I experienced gender when I was in playgroup 20,000 years ago. It was very exciting as Father Christmas came and gave everyone a present. I was heartbroken when I unwrapped my Barbie and realised that all the girls got Barbies and all the boys got Transformers. I asked all the boys and none of them would swap with me.

As a girl who hated girly things, I had gender forced on me by Father Christmas of all people. Luckily he got it right on the big day, cars and lorries were my favourite things to play with and my Fisher Price garage was awesome.

OldCrone · 08/10/2024 21:48

HipTightOnions · 08/10/2024 21:42

Gender is a societal construct, that consists of a set of culturally specific rules that create expectations for each sex.

But that isn't something a person can "have", so presumably people who claim to have gender (identities) mean something different?

No, they are just saying that they comply with the stereotypes or those of the opposite sex. They think this is important. Apparently it is important to them, but most of us aren't interested.

Alittlebitwary · 08/10/2024 21:50

I had always thought (until recently) that gender meant male or female biologically, and this has always stemmed (for me, anyway) from babies for example hearing people ask what gender a newborn baby is etc - who obviously cannot have any societal ideas or beliefs or roles etc influencing this because, well, they're babies! When people have "gender reveals" it's always clearly meant revealing the biological sex of the baby - boy or girl. Putting this here because I wonder how many have always thought the same as this, and if so have we always been wrong about it/ has it always had a different meaning, or is it only recently that the meaning has changed to represent other things that aren't related to the physical biological sex?
It's a genuinely interesting thread tbh.

Thelnebriati · 08/10/2024 21:53

Gender is a performance expected from us based on our sex. The rules change across cultures and throughout time, the only constant is that all male dominated cultures have them. If they were innate they would be consistent.

JellySaurus · 08/10/2024 22:03

Gender is a non-theistic religion. It is unproven and unproveable, yet very real to believers. It is personal to the believer, who believes it is a universal truth. It is vitally important to believers, and irrelevant to unbelievers. It has catechism and affirmation. It has a hierarchy of individuals and organisations who are permitted to dictate doctrine to those lower down the hierarchy. Detractors are shunned and excommunicated.

Circumferences · 08/10/2024 22:08

Alittlebitwary · Today 21:50

From what I understand , Originally, way back, I think gender was always about masculine/feminine rather than what sex you are.

People started to use the word "gender" to mean the same as "sex" at some point in the Victorian era because people got prudish about saying "sex" out loud.

Then at some point in the 1920's everyone ascribed "pink for girls and blue for boys" as the fashion industry took hold (before that all infants wore white) .

Now we've entered a new era, now that plastic surgery and big pharma trends have lead to the rise in transgender stuff, this ideology around gender, sex stereotypes etc has really taken off.

devildeepbluesea · 08/10/2024 22:15

Gender used to be a synonym for sex.

I don’t believe in gender as it’s currently (however loosely) defined.

In my view, gender today is an engineered construct solely designed to promote male superiority. I don’t believe in this, any more than I believe someone can change sex.

JellySaurus · 08/10/2024 22:22

Victorians had no issue with the word sex. It meant female or male, woman or man. Similarly, they had no issue with the word intercourse. It meant social interactions between people. One specific form of intercourse was certainly tabooed in polite Victorian society: sexual intercourse. Gender meant the grammatical assignation of nouns as feminine or masculine in certain languages.

I think it was during the sexual revolution of the 1960s/70s that sex became a shorthand for sexual intercourse. Which may have led to cleverdicks people writing "Yes please!" on forms asking their sex. Or this may be an urban myth. Nonetheless, the prudery which led to 'gender' becoming a euphemism for 'sex' is firmly a result of 20th century freedom, rather than Victorian rigidity.

Circumferences · 08/10/2024 22:28

Hmm so the conflation of sex with gender was maybe more recent than I understand

I apologise to Victorians for blaming them for this clusterfuck.

LoftLaughLoads · 08/10/2024 22:31

Gender is basically sexism rehashed and made over with a tiny twist to say it's totally ok to be sexist so long as you make it a completely free choice about which set of sexist stereotypes you want to be judged against.

XChrome · 08/10/2024 22:32

Alittlebitwary · 08/10/2024 21:50

I had always thought (until recently) that gender meant male or female biologically, and this has always stemmed (for me, anyway) from babies for example hearing people ask what gender a newborn baby is etc - who obviously cannot have any societal ideas or beliefs or roles etc influencing this because, well, they're babies! When people have "gender reveals" it's always clearly meant revealing the biological sex of the baby - boy or girl. Putting this here because I wonder how many have always thought the same as this, and if so have we always been wrong about it/ has it always had a different meaning, or is it only recently that the meaning has changed to represent other things that aren't related to the physical biological sex?
It's a genuinely interesting thread tbh.

Yeah, that has been the definition of it in the past. It has been re-defined by the wokeists for the nebulous concept of gender identity, but I've never seen any of them give a coherent explanation of what it is.

Merriam Webster explains;

"Are gender and sex the same? Usage Guide

The words sex and gender have a long and intertwined history. In the 15th century gender expanded from its use as a term for a grammatical subclass to join sex in referring to either of the two primary biological forms of a species, a meaning sex has had since the 14th century; phrases like "the male sex" and "the female gender" are both grounded in uses established for more than five centuries. In the 20th century sex and gender each acquired new uses. Sex developed its "sexual intercourse" meaning in the early part of the century (now its more common meaning), and a few decades later gender gained a meaning referring to the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex, as in "gender roles." Later in the century, gender also came to have application in two closely related compound terms: gender identity refers to a person's internal sense of being male, female, some combination of male and female, or neither male nor female; gender expression refers to the physical and behavioral manifestations of one's gender identity. By the end of the century gender by itself was being used as a synonym of gender identity.

Among those who study gender and sexuality, a clear delineation between sex and gender is typically prescribed, with sex as the preferred term for biological forms, and gender limited to its meanings involving behavioral, cultural, and psychological traits. In this dichotomy, the terms male and female relate only to biological forms (sex), while the terms masculine/masculinity, feminine/femininity, woman/girl, and man/boy relate only to psychological and sociocultural traits (gender). This delineation also tends to be observed in technical and medical contexts, with the term sex referring to biological forms in such phrases as sex hormones, sex organs, and biological sex. But in nonmedical and nontechnical contexts, there is no clear delineation, and the status of the words remains complicated. Often when comparisons explicitly between male and female people are made, we see the term gender employed, with that term dominating in such collocations as gender differences, gender gap, gender equality, gender bias, and gender relations. It is likely that gender is applied in such contexts because of its psychological and sociocultural meanings, the word's duality making it dually useful. The fact remains that it is often applied in such cases against the prescribed use.

Usage of sex and gender is by no means settled. For example, while discrimination was far more often paired with sex from the 1960s through the 20th century and into the 21st, the phrase gender discrimination has been steadily increasing in use since the 1980s and is on track to become the dominant collocation. Currently both terms are sometimes employed with their intended synonymy made explicit: sex/gender discrimination, gender (sex) discrimination."

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gender

It's this "internal sense of being male or female" which I want people who have this feeling to explain.

Definition of GENDER

a subclass within a grammatical class (such as noun, pronoun, adjective, or verb) of a language that is partly arbitrary but also partly based on distinguishable characteristics (such as shape, social rank, manner of existence, or sex) and that determi...

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gender

OP posts:
AuntyBumBum · 08/10/2024 22:34

No one on this thread has floated the analogy with nationality. For example, at some point someone born British might start to feel American because they've embraced whatever it is (some) Americans are and are "living as" an American (and are possibly accepted as American by other Americans), regardless of their legal status. Interested to hear views.

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