My take on gender -- my relationship with gender is extremely uncomplicated; it's my relationship with humanity that's the trouble -- is that gender is how people will do social improv with you without prompting.
That's got a couple-three consequences; not so much that you can't control it because other people (though you can't, and a whole lot of social group formation is about trying anyway) but that you can't do it without other people, and the other people are not so much often wrong as often hostile. (Facultatively hostile, maliciously hostile, why should you care which it is?)
So if you're across some social presence threshold, you've both not got a meaningful gender -- no one is trying to do improv with you -- and subject to an insistence on gender, one that's entirely in someone else's head.
Dunno if that's got any meaning for you but I find it useful in do-not-make-simple-things-complex sort of way; the emergent is this vast tangle, but the mechanism is simple.
A piece of this is reminding me of a half-remembered "yes, but are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?" example of a culture attempting to put someone into one of a pair of boxes that are entirely-wrong-question.
I'm not sure I entirely agree with the "no one is trying to do improv with you" idea, though, unless one is being picky about the meaning of "with". It seems to me that a lot of the social improv in out-in-the-world spaces involves not-interacting with one another, and the negotiations to determine what sort of not-interaction it is -- whether it's ignoring each other, or an aware non-interaction and on which sides and whether there is an appearance of ignoring the other -- can happen very quickly if both people are flagging the same language.
Part of the structurally common experience of being markedly neurodivergent appears to be the sense of howling into the void; even notably well-meaning persons cannot see you where you are because they haven't got the literal imagination to do it, you were never there at all.
This is distinct from the patterns of effort-cost minimizing social formalism; I think of that not as not-interacting so much as an undocumented API. The bucket of trauma from the experience of being a thing -- no one around you makes any effort to see you where you are; in a prescriptively normative culture, this amounts to having been raised in a randomly variable Skinner box run by psychopaths -- is by no means the result of effort-cost minimization; it's the result of frequently immense effort to make you be someone whom you cannot comprehend and who will not be explained.
I guess you're right that the thread isn't tidy, but it has the absolute ring of truth. I hope places may be made for you. I sometimes feel there are so many people who deserve that, but that the essential fabric of this culture would have to be unravelled and rewoven for that to happen. I don't think that's a bad idea AT ALL, but I don't know if it can be done. I hope I'm wrong.
I wasn't sure if you really wanted people to retweet the thread, so I thought I'd ask first.
There is a lot of unweaving and weaving and reweaving to do (and argh I need to find another place to submit "The Weave and the Weight" to) for certain.
(Um, context: "The Weave and the Weight" is my telling of the myth of Caeneus, an explicitly canonical trans man hero in Greek mythology. It includes weaving. But places to sell literary updates of Greek myths are a bit hard to find....)
Your butch/femme * i [and maybe ???] comment prompts my mind to the image your gender as a glowing path curving through N-dimensional space over time, where most of humanity only really talks about one axis (and maybe even LGBTQ+ communities end up mostly-focused on a particular handful they care most about?). Collapsing multidimensional motion down to a single line loses so much nuance and pattern.
(But that's the metaphor in my head, not yours. :)
Anyhow, I lift a glass to you, and affirm that you are awesome.
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That is a lot.
My take on gender -- my relationship with gender is extremely uncomplicated; it's my relationship with humanity that's the trouble -- is that gender is how people will do social improv with you without prompting.
That's got a couple-three consequences; not so much that you can't control it because other people (though you can't, and a whole lot of social group formation is about trying anyway) but that you can't do it without other people, and the other people are not so much often wrong as often hostile. (Facultatively hostile, maliciously hostile, why should you care which it is?)
So if you're across some social presence threshold, you've both not got a meaningful gender -- no one is trying to do improv with you -- and subject to an insistence on gender, one that's entirely in someone else's head.
Dunno if that's got any meaning for you but I find it useful in do-not-make-simple-things-complex sort of way; the emergent is this vast tangle, but the mechanism is simple.
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I'm not sure I entirely agree with the "no one is trying to do improv with you" idea, though, unless one is being picky about the meaning of "with". It seems to me that a lot of the social improv in out-in-the-world spaces involves not-interacting with one another, and the negotiations to determine what sort of not-interaction it is -- whether it's ignoring each other, or an aware non-interaction and on which sides and whether there is an appearance of ignoring the other -- can happen very quickly if both people are flagging the same language.
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Part of the structurally common experience of being markedly neurodivergent appears to be the sense of howling into the void; even notably well-meaning persons cannot see you where you are because they haven't got the literal imagination to do it, you were never there at all.
This is distinct from the patterns of effort-cost minimizing social formalism; I think of that not as not-interacting so much as an undocumented API. The bucket of trauma from the experience of being a thing -- no one around you makes any effort to see you where you are; in a prescriptively normative culture, this amounts to having been raised in a randomly variable Skinner box run by psychopaths -- is by no means the result of effort-cost minimization; it's the result of frequently immense effort to make you be someone whom you cannot comprehend and who will not be explained.
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I wasn't sure if you really wanted people to retweet the thread, so I thought I'd ask first.
P.
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If you wish to do retweetings, that is okay.
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(Poor Caeneus.)
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Your butch/femme * i [and maybe ???] comment prompts my mind to the image your gender as a glowing path curving through N-dimensional space over time, where most of humanity only really talks about one axis (and maybe even LGBTQ+ communities end up mostly-focused on a particular handful they care most about?). Collapsing multidimensional motion down to a single line loses so much nuance and pattern.
(But that's the metaphor in my head, not yours. :)
Anyhow, I lift a glass to you, and affirm that you are awesome.
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o/~ so raise a glass if you are wrong / in all the right ways o/~
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Which is probably not a surprise by now, really.
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