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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.
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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