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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Date: 2022-06-10 01:50 am (UTC)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.