The other day, I was talking to a bunch of my friends, and Germany's offering a third gender option on birth certificates came up. Some of them were a bit confused, having never heard anything contrary to their idea of a gender binary, and in the three minutes I had, I tried to explain about the existence of agender, genderqueer, bigender, etc people. Later, I got a text saying "I thought about what you said about gender and I agree with the idea but anthropologically I disagree." I'm kind of curious as to how he can support that, and was wondering about ways in which to better explain the gender dimensions of our hyperdimensional magical beings. Basically, how do you explain gender to people who are coming into the conversation with a fairly closed mind?
It's a difficult thing to do. If anyone knows how, tell me too. I've tried to have this conversation once or twice, then gave up and kept my opinion to myself.
Simply put, I see gender and sex as two different but usually alligning concepts- sex deals with the sexual and secondary sexual characteristics of a person- if someone has a penis, they're considered male bodied. Therefore, they are assigned male at birth. Gender has more to do with personal identification and I may go as far to say as say it also has to do with an individual's brain structure. So someone may be male bodied and identify as male- therefore they're a man. Someone else who's male bodied may identify as a woman- therefore she's a woman. And so on, when someone's bigendered/pangendered/queer/etc. And what of intersex individuals? Ask your friend that and see what he comes up with?
What memphis said, but a couple other things: Sex is a concept based through biology. Gender is a concept based through society and psychology. That's really the picture I tend to paint, and it people seem to get it.
I've been doing a lot of explaining lately as I'm transitioning to the use of singular they/them as my pronouns. Here's my technique. I think that any time you want to teach someone something, you have to tie in information they already know. Most people are fairly familiar with the general concept of being transexual, so I start there. First I talk about the difference between gender and sex, and then talk about transexual individuals, and very briefly cover some of the things they deal with (passing, pronouns, transition, and dysphoria). Then I introduce the different ways people think about gender. I usually talk about a spectrum with male on one side, and female on the other first. Spectrums are easy to understand. Once I introduce that concept, it's usually pretty easy for my audience to get how someone could be in the middle, or androgynous. Depending on time constraints and audience interest, I might essentially leave it at that, although I usually bring up the word trans* and briefly touch on a few of the labels it can contain (genderqueer, gender-fluid, etc.). If I have a little more time, I try to make the distinction between transgender and transexual. (my definitions: transexual - a person who changes their sex. Someone who does hormone replacement therapy, surgery, etc. Usually someone within the binary. transgender (or trans*) - a person whose gender, sex, and/or gender assigned at birth do not match. They may or may not be binary, or transition physically in any way.) If I have yet more time, I will present the way most psychologists think about gender. In psychology you have two scales, one is masculinity, the other femininity. They are from 0-10, and are independent of one another. A person can be a 0 on both, a 10 on both, a 10 on one and a 5 on the other, or any other combination. I present this by having my audience brainstorm feminine and masculine traits, and then talk about examples of how someone could have lots or few of traits from both lists. This leads easily into discussing more complex identities of agender, genderqueer, etc. If I feel so inclined, I might also bring up the concept of fluidity, and gender-fluid or bi-gender. Does this little outline help? Or would you like more concrete examples of what I say?
