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.
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.
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 wasn't sure if you really wanted people to retweet the thread, so I thought I'd ask first.
P.
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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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Which is probably not a surprise by now, really.
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