Posted byu/ITSecHackerGuy
7 hours ago
What is gender?
I have been thinking about the idea of gender-fluidity but I can't think about it properly without knowing what exactly is being debated.

From what I understand, the claim is that gender should be separated from sex. I think everyone agrees that there are only two sexes: Male and Female.

Gender has historically been associated with gender in such a way that these two terms became interchangeable.

The idea, as I see it, is that there's an attempt to strip this connection. This can only happen in two ways:

You define gender to be a completely subjective term that represents how you feel about what you are andacknowledge that there is an infinite amount of possible genders. This also requires gender to be removed fromlegislation, replaced by the word "sex", which holds the same meaning as the old "gender". The result is simply anew word that represents how you feel about yourself.

You define gender very carefully to avoid having to exclude it from legal documentation by creating subgroups belonging to the preexisting gender classification, for example.

Male Man

Male Woman

Female Man

Female Woman

This allows the society to still apply the same rules and filters while also recognizing the validity of different ways of expressing yourself.



From what I gathered, Scenario 1 is much more common. There are no problems with either scenario, as they still preserve the meaning of being a Man or a Woman. As an example for why it's required to preserve this idea is sports. You can't have a transgender woman playing on a woman's sports team. In scenario one this woman would be classified as a Male and the team would be called Female's sports team. In Scenario two it's the same thing except the Woman would be classified as a Male Woman.



My first question is, do you agree with what I said or do you believe in a different scenario?



My second question is this: In either of these scenarios, no real differences in the society happen, except for the illusion of "acceptance" provided by the change of meaning and application of a single word. Why would it be desirable? How would this help? The problem I'm having with it is that not only does this require a lot of effort to implement in a way that doesn't confuse society, it's also fueling the acceptance of a psychiatric disorder, similar to changing the word "reality" to whatever you think is real, in order to help people suffering from schizophrenia accept themselves better.