leaf gender rant

aight so: "how the fuck does being trans work and how do i know if i am"

well, a lot of people give different answers for this. i'm gonna give you my own first, but i will list the alternative interps just so you have the full spectrum of info. my interpretation: gender is a weird-ass social construct thing that's really goddamn hard to define in terms of logic. the thing is that when you try to come up with shit that marks a "woman" or a "man", the vast majority is either raw biology or dated gender norms. obviously gender norms suck as a way to define it - not every "tomboy" would actually rather be a man.

now, in terms of raw biology: i think, personally, that defining the genders in terms of the low-level biological impulses that primarily had relevance back when humans were hunter-gatherers is kind of bad:tm:. first of all, it implies to some degree that we as humans are slaves to these animalistic impulses, which i personally hate; people often use that argument to justify things like, say, rape, and i think to say that is to spit upon human progress. it is true that there are some brain differences between "males" and "females", and as i might have told you before, trans people often had brains more similar to the sex they identified with than their birth sex. however, until we know more about the specific workings of the brain, i don't think this is something solid enough to base a definition of gender on entirely. additionally, drawing an arbitrary line in the sand to determine whether a person's brain is "male enough" is dumb in the same way that trying to categorize intersex people into "male" or "female" and giving them surgery to make their genitals more "normal" is.

so if i personally dislike both basic biology and gender norms as a foundation for gender, the question remains: what the fuck *is* it? and that's a real hard question for me to answer, since i'm still working on the answer myself.

at least for now, i think that gender norms are intertwined too deeply into our society's idea of gender/sex for it to really be possible to separate them. people are working to separate gender norms from gender today - that's feminism, at least the good kind - but right now, we're not far enough along, imo, to really define gender in a solid, logical, concrete way that doesn't incorporate sexist gender norms or reduce humans to their animal instincts.

so then what the fuck do we do? well, i'm basically just running with "call people whatever they prefer to be called". whatever makes them most comfortable. i don't care whether someone experiences dysphoria or has a socially accepted gender or is/is not "trans enough". if they wanna be called something, i'll do my best to accept it. do i think some of the proposed genders out there (what the fuck does it mean to be
"pangender"?) are weird as fuck? yeah, i do. but the thing is - gender is such a fucking mess of bullshit that society threw together over the course of a couple thousand years of history. i think that "gender" as it exists in most of society today is complete bullshit, and if gender is actually a real, concrete thing, i think we have no grasp whatsoever of it. so who am i to tell people that their ways of defying this arbitrary nonsensical standard of gender are wrong? in my view, it's all dumb bullshit, and so if you feel better being a girl, then i'll call you a girl. i don't care about the details.

now as for what *others* think, i'll list a few viewpoints below:

- the biology viewpoint: gender is based entirely on which sex characteristics you want to have. if you want tiddies/vagina/etc, you're a woman. if you want dick/ballze/etc, you're a man. if you want some combination of the two, you're nonbinary. if you don't have any desire to change your body's physical sex characteristics, you're cis, full stop.
- the fuck it all viewpoint: gender is completely and entirely a social construct. if you say you're a girl, then that just means you're choosing to identify with the societal standards of what a girl's supposed to be, even if you don't act stereotypically "girly" in any way besides calling yourself a girl. in an ideal world, the concept of gender would be utterly nonexistent, and trans/gender confused people are confused because they're trying to find meaning in something which has none.
- the instinct viewpoint: men are strong/aggressive/confident. women are dainty/submissive/elegant. gender is solely composed of traits like these, and trying to make gender anything else besides these norms that currently exist is dumb; the only meaning gender can have is which biological/societal instincts that you're more inclined towards. wanting to be another gender just means your brain isn't wired to do the things the sex you were born with are supposed to.
- the terf viewpoint: trans women aren't real women, they're just trying to get into our safe spaces. trans men are victims of toxic masculinity. what's a nonbinary?
- the deep south viewpoint: BEING TRANS IS A MENTAL ILLNESS. GOD DIDN'T WANT YOU TO BE A <PREFERRED GENDER> AND YOU'RE DEFYING HIS WILL BY BUYING INTO THIS NONSENSE. GO TO A CHRISTIAN THERAPIST, OR A CONVERSION CAMP, BECAUSE YOU'RE A SUBHUMAN UNTIL YOU LEARN TO CONFORM.