Gender

I'm not going to lie. I'm acutely irritated at the fact that this page needs to exist, even if only to be informative.

My "gender"

It all started with the colour of my skin.

During my earliest memories of existence, many inaccurate, problematic characteristics were widely applied to me, based of how the person interpreted me. It felt suffocating to be aware that I didn't particularly follow the grain of society while people were desperate to place me in a box of other people, based on their initial perception of me. Obviously, dysphoria stemming from my physical appearance will begin causing issues before dysphoria from my personality and gender, so this is something I experienced as early as my toddler years. No, I don't play sports, don't like basketball, don't eat fried chicken or watermelon (which I am allergic to), don't use AAVE or am obsessed with curvy women. But that's how I'll be described by most cohorts during my school life and many adult Floridians even after I graduated. Ultimately, my dark skin colour attributes entirely for my initial disdain for societal prejudice, which later on shapes the framework that led to a gender identity that abhorrently rejects societally-assigned predisposition.

I don't consider myself as having a gender. That would mean that I am agender, or without a gender. This is a class under the non-binary umbrella.

What is the appeal in proclaiming that I follow a set of arbitrary societal expectations based upon my physical sex? All that does is confuse people if I dare have preferences and opinions that don't align to what is expected of others in my sexual cohort. It is important to clarify that I am not denying my biological sex. This page is about gender, not physical sex. Since English uses the same words for gender to refer to sex (male, female), some people confuse this concept with people asserting that they are not their original biological sex. This is not what I am asserting.

I am asserting that I am not a subscriber to a societal group I don't know anything about. If someone is confused on why a male human might be interested in art and design, dancing, singing, and other traits often associated against masculinity, that's due to their own personal expectations being subverted. This is why I set the expectation against having these expectations.

Though, for practicality's sake, I often end up expressing myself more masculinely. "Male" clothing tends to be more durable and useful. I like having pockets...

But I won't restrict myself to masculine habits just because I am physically male, because there is nothing naturally masculine or feminine about a piece of cloth or colour... historically, different colours can have psychological effects on people, and it made sense to gender colours when humans lacked the intelligence we have now. Males are often more aggressive and impulsive biologically, and humans have evolved to be able to subdue their subconscious. That's what makes them human. Using this reason to justify a concept such as "biological genders" is nothing but undoing thousands of years of evolution, returning humans to the same state of wild animals.

Why?

Just because some people want to impose their own beliefs about how I should feel, act, and express myself, doesn't mean I need to comply with them. It doesn't make any sense for someone to try to headcanon a living human being.

I'm not limiting my freedoms for something as stupid as that. Stating upforth that I don't match the persona that's dreamed up by anyone's concept of "a man" or "a woman" reduces conflict.

Pronouns

My pronouns are they / them. These are not "preferred" pronouns, these are the correct pronouns to use when referring to me, whether or not I'm in the same room as you or not.

At one point, I didn't mind whatever pronouns a person used. I really hated them all in reality because they all did the same thing: box me in with traits that don't actually apply to me. However, allowing gendered pronouns is the entrypoint of having people direct gender stereotypes against a person. which is not always an issue for people. Most people associate with others of their same sex in the first place.

However, the more comfortable a person gets with referring to me as "he" or "she", the more comfortable they got associating me with gendered traits, which became problematic as they discover traits that don't actually align to the gender they are assigning to me.

"They" has never been an exclusively plural pronoun. This claim is just as braindead as pretending 'you' is "only" singular or "only" plural.

If you're talking about me with new people, please don't use my first name; use North, my middle name that most people know me as.

Definition of gender

There's two different words for sex and gender for a reason. Sex describes a physical and biological makeup of an organism for the purpose of reproduction, gender is a non-physical trait exclusive to humans, as a byproduct of our societal awareness. Gender is a collection of societally-defined expectations and customs for each sex.

For most people, they either already match these expectations or can happily conform to them. For other people, their character and actions don't match those traits. That leads to feelings of displacement because they are told that they should be experiencing traits that they do not naturally possess. This may eventually lead to a dysphoric everyday life experience, depending on the person's willingness to cover their natural traits and conform with societal expectations.

Over time, having to constantly hide themselves or "put on a mask" to avoid getting berated ends up subtracting from any positive experiences life has to offer.

So some of these people assert that they do not exhibit traits that are normally expected of members of their sex, and may change their name and appearance to match whichever is stereotypical of the group they associate with. In sum, this is the concept of gender dysphoria and transgenderism.

But I notice a "catch 22" for people experiencing these issues. By transitioning to their true and correct gender, that person is thereby reinforcing the stereotypes of their corrected gender identity - inherently maintaining a societal norm for members of their gender to all act or behave in a similar way. Such action fuels gender-based dysphoria for others.

For these reasons, and other opinions I personally hold, gender is rapidly becoming socially outdated. This isn't a simple opinion, nor a display of being "woke", it is a scientifically observable event. For those where transitioning to another gender alleviates their dysphoria, more power to them. But I just wish "gender" as defined above never existed in the first place.

Continued

Feel free to skip this, I might just delete everything from here on...

There is a reason pets and babies of either sex do not show any natural preference to the socially defined standards of what is masculine or feminine, such as blue versus pink, racecars versus flowers, cute versus grisly. While non-human animals generally don't later adopt this learned behaviour, humans do.

What exactly do these represent? Masculinity generally is associated with brash, bold, and risky behaviour. The primary sex hormones for males is testosterone, which is a key factor for increased bone and muscle development. These qualities led male humans of millennia-past to naturally excel at tasks that require high strength and physical durability. Tasks such as breadwinning for the tribe were necessary during these times and male humans had an undeniable natural aptitude to do so. It shouldn't come too much as a surprise that when the first societies formed, their members associated males with physical strength and aggression. This classification of traits, roles, and expectations based upon a person's sex is called a gender. To be explicit, a gender is not a physical or observable trait. To be more explicit, many of these roles and traits are no longer required or observed with modern humans, who have the mental capacity for impulse control and unique ability to learn specific desired behavior.

Before we are even born, we are often celebrated for the genitals that we possess as a baby. After we are born, we are adorned with socially masculine and feminine clothing and segregated to play amongst those with similar bodies. Babies are often biased towards one gender extreme before they learn the alphabet.

Humans often keep the associations they make during childhood for life. Speaking of the alphabet, this is why language learning skills are most critical during the first few years of a child's life, as the child is making fresh synaptic connections for the first time. For language, this is called the Critical Period hypothesis. However, this "critical period" also is present in virtually any aspect of human learning, including that of social association.

This behaviour being passed down from parents and reinforced during childhood is what strengthens the concept of a gender binary: the idea that there are two extremes that a person needs to adhere to, based on their physical sex.

Patterns, to animals and humans, are like a drug. If one notices a running trend amongst those who share a number physical traits, they will instinctively associate these members with similar traits. However, as humans gained the capacity for impulse control, this is another trait that humans have capacity for modifying. Instead of pooling society in a 50% box of males and 50% box of females, and assigning traits to each, why not use your unique ability as a human to engage in critical thinking and assign traits based on each individual? These traits are rarely anything more than simple character statistics, so it isn't any different from learning a new person's personality.

In the current day, I see it as a self-defeating concept. If gender cannot be used to significantly prejudge someone, and if it is not based on objective immutable traits, what purpose does it serve?

If I were to make blind assumptions on someone based on their gender, I would be fueling severe dysphoria for someone else, even if both are cisgender (consistent with society's expectation of a person's sex). If being feminine was to be regal and dainty, then a woman who has been bold and upstanding for her entire life, expressing more masculine traits rather than feminine may not feel that she is, in fact, a woman - even is she knows she is female. This can become a conflict when the very fact that she is female becomes a limiting factor in society, being excluded or prejudged against the mere fact that she is female. This person may relate to her male friends and their experiences more closely than her female friends and their experiences. However, she is told by society that she must assimilate with the rest of the members of her sex, even if it goes against her principles and character. It would have been easier for this person if they were born as a male, because they wouldn't have to limit or seclude their identity because their identity would now be expected of them.

In a perfect world, the concept of being "assigned" a gender doesn't exist at all, and no one's gender is assumed in the first place based off of their sex.

If I were to assume "all women" had a stereotypical trait, but it turned out that any specific cisgender woman didn't, wouldn't that be counter-intuitive and wrong for me to assume that there's something wrong with that woman? In my opinion, many of these problems could be averted if society moves towards a gender-neutral makeup. While not fully eliminated, dysphoria could be lessened from the result of a lesser impact on gender in day-to-day life. People wouldn’t feel out of place due to these often-incorrect assumptions about their character and abilities based on definitions of gender that vary from person to person.

Of course, despite this, there are certain fundamental differences in both sexes, both physically and hormonal. The male gender is associated with aggression, physical strength, and leadership roles due to biological and hormonal catalysts for this behavior naturally existing in the corresponding sex. Historically, this led to males being objectively better equipped fits for related roles, and over time, these competencies became stronger as they continued to be utilised. A natural example of evolution.

An example of accepted sexism would be how a female in marriage traditionally takes the male’s last name, but not the other way around. Unlike wed males, who stay as a mister, a female in marriage becomes a mistress (Mrs.) from former status of “miss”, implying that their value or status changes depending on if they have a token husband or not. There are entire languages which are founded on gendered grammar, where nouns are gendered based on a degree of masculinity or femininity of that noun. And a lot of this ends up being self-contradictory or self-limiting.

What is masculine in America could be highly feminine in Africa. Many of the gender roles that are currently being observed, only continue to do so, due to people feeling as if they need to conform to them as per formality, or what’s expected of them – an inherently societal issue. The influence of biological factors favoring certain sexes over others in certain tasks still undeniably exists, albeit, to an increasingly lesser degree than it has been historically.

The term “feminist” is really terrible, as it implies a catering more towards females and less towards equality for humanity itself, despite the actual goal of the movement. You don’t demand equality for two different subjects while going out of your way to highlight that there is a difference between those subjects. You stop highlighting the differences if you want to bring attention away from them, or acknowledge them on an equal field.

As an example, unless you are tasked with identifying a person or doing anything medical related, refer to a person as “man”, not “[insert race here] man”. Would it not be patronising and counterintuitive to praise someone for a mundane achievement just on the basis of the color of their skin? You would be implying that it is uncommon for a person of that race to achieve this mundane task. That's even more of an insult than insulting the race directly.

• “Oh, that’s impressive… for a [insert race here] guy.”
• “We are so proud that we have had 500 [insert race here] graduates this year!”

What does that achieve? Calling attention to things like this undermines the concept of “equality”; it is implying that the achievement is abnormal compared to the rest of the race. It is therefore inherently prejudicial to assume that other people of that race are incapable or otherwise exemplary of certain achievements.

The work that individuals do ends up being cast to the side and the fact that they are part of a specific group is now what becomes showcased.