Comment by EnergyAmy
5 days ago
Realizing that men and women are different and a man putting on a dress doesn't make him a woman goes back much further across all cultures.
5 days ago
Realizing that men and women are different and a man putting on a dress doesn't make him a woman goes back much further across all cultures.
Realizing that the sex classifications (male, female, intersex etc) are only tangentially related to gender roles seems to me to be about the most basic concession to reality that one could make in these times.
What constitutes the gender role of "a man" or "a woman" is fluid, not well defined, and subject to change. What constitutes "femininity" and "masculinity" is also fluid, not well defined, and subject to change.
Even if sex was a binary (which it isn't, but it's not a terrible argument to say that it is close enough to one for many purposes), when it comes to gender we all exist in a multi-dimensional space with so many variations on so many themes. Insisting that gender is binary is so harmful, even to people who consider themselves as being at one or other end of that binary. It's fine that there are people who fully embody a particular Victorian-era notion of masculine and feminine (or any other one, really), but the vast majority of us are nowhere near that simple. Insisting that gender comes in only two forms, and has no fluidity to it hurts all of us.
> Realizing that men and women are different and a man putting on a dress doesn't make him a woman goes back much further across all cultures
Some cultures have known that things are not binary for a very long time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijra_(South_Asia)
That's orthogonal to my statement. They still recognize that male hijra are not women. Nobody in history has said "I would like a wife to start a family, I will go find a nice hijra", and if they did, they were quickly disabused of the viability of that plan.
It's not orthogonal because you made no attempt to make it clear whether were you were talking about sex or gender, which are not the same.
Being "a wife to start a family" requires a person with female sex, and is typically associated with female gender. But that association is not required, and has not been so across all human cultures and all time.
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