![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
So a fair number of people are discussing gendering at the moment. Most of these people aren't actually people whose journals I read regularly, but a couple of people whose journals I do read regularly have been commenting upon same with occasional links back.
I have a weird sort of interaction with matters of gender.
On ap, the standard of politeness is to use 'zie' or other gender-neutral pronouns for folks who one's not aware of preference for. When this gets used on me, it drives me completely insane. I consider GNP useful for people whose gender is unknown, unspecified, or other; my gender is none of these. Being identified as a 'he' is several (perhaps five or six) orders of magnitude more accurate than being referred to as a 'zie'. It actually has components of 'true' to it.
Most of the time I'm comfortable accepting 'female' as a word that describes me. I can't say I identify as female; it isn't a matter that has that much sfik-value for me. I've always had the basic attitude-feeling that if I do it, it has to be the sort of thing that women do, more or less.
Except.
Except.
When I'm spending time with women -- with Earth-woman-gendered-women -- I often wind up feeling like I'm doing the whole woman thing somehow wrong.
(This thought comes out in pretty simple trigonometry; for those people who run screaming from mathematics, I apologise; I can't do it any better.)
Unit circle centered on the origin; X-axis female-ness, Y-axis maleness. I'm not on either of the axes; I'm up about thirty degrees or so. I have a distinct, specified, very clear gender, located somewhere about half root-3 X + .5 Y, and when I'm near women who're near 1 on X, I'm clearly not fulfilling what womanness is by comparison, because I've got an angle there that I'm taking the cosine of to get there. Unit length falls short.
My gender is not unknown, unspecified, or other; it's just . . . a bit irrational.
"She" is close enough for everyday use. Call it about 86.6% accurate.
I have a weird sort of interaction with matters of gender.
On ap, the standard of politeness is to use 'zie' or other gender-neutral pronouns for folks who one's not aware of preference for. When this gets used on me, it drives me completely insane. I consider GNP useful for people whose gender is unknown, unspecified, or other; my gender is none of these. Being identified as a 'he' is several (perhaps five or six) orders of magnitude more accurate than being referred to as a 'zie'. It actually has components of 'true' to it.
Most of the time I'm comfortable accepting 'female' as a word that describes me. I can't say I identify as female; it isn't a matter that has that much sfik-value for me. I've always had the basic attitude-feeling that if I do it, it has to be the sort of thing that women do, more or less.
Except.
Except.
When I'm spending time with women -- with Earth-woman-gendered-women -- I often wind up feeling like I'm doing the whole woman thing somehow wrong.
(This thought comes out in pretty simple trigonometry; for those people who run screaming from mathematics, I apologise; I can't do it any better.)
Unit circle centered on the origin; X-axis female-ness, Y-axis maleness. I'm not on either of the axes; I'm up about thirty degrees or so. I have a distinct, specified, very clear gender, located somewhere about half root-3 X + .5 Y, and when I'm near women who're near 1 on X, I'm clearly not fulfilling what womanness is by comparison, because I've got an angle there that I'm taking the cosine of to get there. Unit length falls short.
My gender is not unknown, unspecified, or other; it's just . . . a bit irrational.
"She" is close enough for everyday use. Call it about 86.6% accurate.
Tags:
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
From:
no subject
Question (with neither positive nor negative but merely curious connotations): Do you consider me an earth-woman-gendered-woman?
From:
no subject
If I were to label you, I would probably put you somewhere between "butch" and "geek", weighted maybe a bit towards the former. Which isn't, gnar. Different set of axes to look at it that way. Need more dimensions. Thingy.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
Mundane women, or the... er... "different" people like us? Or both?
I have to admit I don't really get along with most women who've been socialized to mainstream society. But under the right conditions, I can apparently pass as one convincingly enough to get offers from nice mundane boys who would run screaming for the hills if they actually knew me. *toothy smile*
From:
no subject
Ever noticed that?
The presentations, the attitudes, there's a particular normative force towards a particular axis: interest in technical minutiae and trivia, lack of overmuch concern about physical appearance, tendency to dissociate from other people with terms like 'mundane', obliviousness to a fair number of social norms especially including mating rituals.
Some days I consider myself gendered 'geek'. But then I don't wind up talking about baseball unless I'm doing stat-crunching, because Geeks Don't Do Sports. Or stuff like that.
From:
no subject
*LOL* Right. This is true. (Which relates to a previous comment of yours, calling engineers an orientation.)
On the other hand, I'm only interested in the technical minutiae that interest ME, and thus find many geek conversations dreadfully dull. I care about my physical appearance, but I work towards MY appearance goals, which are a bit skew to those of mainstream society. I generally get really peeved when people use the term "mundane", as I think it sounds like they're trying to parley being rejected into being superior. And I'm decent with the social skills when I'm on an even emotional keel.
So where does that put me? On the fringe of the fringe? Some days I think I should go live in a cave with a volleyball for a friend. :P
From:
no subject
I think you're closer to 'female' than I am, and I'm more 'geek' than you, if you want my opinion on targeting solutions. ;)
From:
no subject
Well, my take on it is more that gender is great, but it's not nearly as relevant to personality as many people seem to think it is. Certainly not when you start talking about individuals instead of population averages. I think I would actually make a better Traditional Male than I would a Traditional Female, but I certainly consider myself to be a perfectly good female as I am. (I guess this is my little fantasy world again, where the virtues of female-ness include strength and assertiveness.)
But that goes back to the fact I obliquely alluded to before, that my friends tend to be more towards the center of the traditional male / female continuum than Joe or Jane Average are. I just don't find the people who are exaggerated caricatures of either gender very appealing.
The things I find admirable in men I also find admirable in women, and vice versa. Not that there's no difference due to gender, but to me such differences are more like hearing the same piece interpreted by two different pianists, rather than completely different pieces of music. Or should be, anyway, in any reasonably evolved human being.
From:
no subject
I have no further comment to make, principally because I'm too busy to think about it properly, and it's the sort of subject that requires several hours of thought rather than a few minutes of waffle :/
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
Hmm, does this tie into your "round women" post of a short while back?
FWIW, I don't think any of the women I hang out with fit the "Traditional Female" model very closely. They're all much more complicated than that...which has a lot to do with why I hang out with them. ;-)
From:
no subject
I would prefer a generic gender-neutral pronoun, like "it", without the implication of non-human-ness. I don't like having to make decisions about "what gender I am" or "what gender I want other people to think I am". Whichever label someone picks, I always feel "not really, no. But sorta."
From:
no subject
What surprises me is not that people who only know me online / in print get odd signals from me. It is that some of them get so stressed by that. I can't get my mind around that, organizing one's model of the world so that boy vs. girl is the very navel of reality.
I do seriously dislike all the non-gendered pronoun sets I have seen, though.
MAO
From:
Friend of a friend
Gender and anthropology are interests of mine, too. And gender is so terribly complicated, and difficult to define. Your careful placement put a new spin on the question for me, which is useful.
I think a lot of women wind up feeling that they're doing gender somehow "wrong" (I know I do, sometimes-- although, really, it doesn't bother me at all anymore), and I think this is somehow an aspect of our culture. Judith Butler looks at gender as performance, but I wonder if Susan Bordo's analysis of gender (and the body) as something perfectible doesn't hit the mark a little more closely for me. After all, aren't we all held up to some weird standard of perfection (both genders) from time to time?
Anyway, a few random thoughts. What I really wanted to do was just to stop by and tell you that I really liked your post!
Other Rose/Akycha
From:
no subject
It bothers me some, but mostly because I am who I am, and I don't understand exactly why I get tagged with the 'male' tag. Mark argues that it's because I have a couple of the male personality traits that seem to stay permanently on.
I'm certainly *not* an earth-mother-woman-type ... *wry grin* and I don't mind being called a guy, really .... I just wish I knew why it happened on a semi-regular basis. (:
From:
no subject
Human beings seem to have an inherent need to sort, categorize, and label. I'm really good at -- it used to be my job. But I was a cataloger/classifier of printed material, not people. Trying to apply labels to human beings is a pretty futile process. I mean, we change you know? Sometimes I wear girly dresses and cook elaborate meals from scratch and paint my fingernails. Other times I wear jeans and watch football and swear like a sailor. And then too, sometimes I paint my nails while watching football and swearing like a sailor. :-) I do those things because I like them. Neither I nor my husband fulfill stereotyped gender expectations.
As I said, I like that so many people commenting here don't 'get' it. They got where I am without as much struggle and damage as I took. Progress!
MKK
From:
no subject
Gender is one of those bizarre things that I don't think about much in relation to myself, other than acknowledging that I'm female but feeling distinctly unfeminine when around what
Oy. Gender makes my head hurt.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
I experimented with axes and plotting some time ago, but I think for me to get it right, for me, I'd need a Family Circus-style meandering dotted line, and for some reason people don't take that kind of thing seriously as a declaration of identity.
From:
no subject
And now I ponder that I arguably don't trust things that categorise neatly. Probably because they lead me to expect another shoe.