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What does it mean to be "male" or "female?"

Discussion in 'Gender Identity and Expression' started by Kodo, Feb 21, 2017.

  1. Kodo

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    Genitals aside, what does it mean to be male or female? I was thinking about this question because I often try to rationalize with myself that maybe I am wrong about all of this. Am I a guy because I want to be? If one's brain is not distinctly male or female, especially when someone is pre-HRT, how do you know?

    Basically my question to you is by what criteria do you measure your sense of being male or female, as a trans-person or otherwise?
     
  2. MisterMissy

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    Everyone will surely have their own interpretation on this topic.

    For me, it actually comes down to what I recognize as the familiar traits of men and women. Men typically wear comfortable and loose clothing whereas women may wear clothes that are form-fitting but sacrifice comfort for beauty (they certainly don't have to though). Men typically like violence and action in their games and media, whereas women may prefer drama, mystery, and romance. Men like sports. Women like crafts. Men like to race. Women like to dance. Men are very reserved when it comes to their emotions, women are more in-sync with them and openly express them.

    These are most definitely not always true and shouldn't need to be. And for those who are androgynous, tom-boys, or gender-fluid, they probably aren't. But for those who are trans or want to make the change, and for those like me who feel there is a clear voice of the opposite gender speaking out from inside of them, these gender stereotypes allow me to recognize this about myself, and that I want to express that side of myself more.

    There are of course other physical traits of bone structure, distribution of fat cells, the shape of the cheeks, forehead, nose, jaw line, shoulders, size of hands and feet, and other cosmetic things that are much more scientifically measurable about males and females. And people who want to make the surgical MTF or FTM change want these other cosmetic changes besides the genitals, in order to be as comfortable with themselves, and as convincing to others as possible.
     
    #2 MisterMissy, Feb 21, 2017
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  3. Kasey

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    The last statement of the attempt at biological legitimacy is what drives many trans people. It's like... I want to have all of my current interests but live in a female form and also be allowed to pursue traditionally feminine pursuits. If I was biologically "that girl who loves video games and beer" I'd be a every man's fantasy instead of a pretender to the throne for many people. But fuck that shit. I'm me and I'm happy.
     
  4. Mihael

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    My brain is male. I can tell that by how I relate to other people and who I identify with and who I reassemble, and what the gender of those people is. And I don't want that. I want to be a normal woman, but I'm not.

    ---------- Post added 21st Feb 2017 at 01:50 PM ----------

    Maybe I'm a tomboy(?), who cares...
     
  5. Irisviel

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    It's quite complicated to define, because even using statistics places where men and women overlap are missing from the picture. Although, being male or female does correspond to a certain way the brain responds to the environment and those tiny details put together form the experienced gender. And while some ideologues will tell you that because the differences can be so tiny it means male and female minds are the same, actually the sum of all the parts is what makes it an observable difference.

    How does that relate to being trans and when do you say you are a man/woman? Well, in general you can test that quite reliably in conjunction with subjective feelings reported by the individual. And I don't mean some silly internet tests, I mean actual psychological evaluation.

    You can say men and women differ by personality traits and emotional responses. And while you can have men who are feminine, usually while they exceed the average in some traits, they still would test positive for male traits in other aspects. Take that with a grain of salt as I'm not a psychologist but more or less this is what I've been able to learn studying the matter.

    Imagine you are a computer programm. Male and female programs might achieve same goals but they use slightly different algorithms to do so. And even a feminine guy would still be emotional in a male way, even if not passing as such in the outer presentation; the way he processes emotions will differ.
     
  6. Aliscythe

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    I tend to feel like it has a lot to do with how folks bond and communicate with others, how they signal amongst each other within the gender and between genders. At least the boom for me was when I finally realized that I was either missing this interplay entirely or signaling from the "wrong" gender. It wasn't so much interest or emotion at a macro level, but how I emoted, what my nonverbals were, how I carried myself, what I emphasized in communication. "
     
    #6 Aliscythe, Feb 21, 2017
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  7. Cinis

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    If you look at the definition of gender it's actually quite simple: Gender is essentially how one works and interacts within a society.

    This doesn't mean stereotypes though, otherwise every girl that chooses blue over pink couldn't be considered a girl.
    It's rather how you want people to perceive and interact with you, after all a girl and a boy with the same personality would still be treated differently by society.

    As such a masculine woman isn't male because she still interacts with society as a female. A transman on the other hand is male because he wishes to be perceived as a man by society ( ie. by using male pronouns, name and transitioning physically).

    This definition obviously poses some problems with the topic of sexism and definitely isn't the reason behind transgender individuals but...it sort of gives a better understanding of "gender" than just merely social roles and biology.
     
  8. HojaVioleta

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    Basically, gender is a social construct, and the terms on which people experience gender and define their own gender are often very different, though all valid. But among trans people, some people may justify their (for example) womanhood based on feminine interests, roles they're more comfortable in, others on dysphoria, others may be masculine but nonetheless women etc. I gave up on gender long ago. That doesn't mean other people's genders arent valid. But there's no one measure with which someone can say you're a woman or a man or anything else, other than, you know, saying it.
     
  9. Mihael

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    Am I the only one to not have a clue what big difference there is if we take sexuality and fertility out of the equation?
    :help:
     
  10. gravechild

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    That is the Million Dollar Question, isn't it? I've been obsessed with that question for as long as I can remember. Is it the body parts we're born with? Trans men and women prove that false. Our interests? Well, plenty of men and women are gender non-conforming. Personality? Expression? Attractions?

    I would be stumped whenever a bully boy would suddenly become a giant puppy dog around girls he liked. Some feminists believe gender is entirely learned: a caste-like system. I think the truth is somewhere between biology and socialization, perhaps leaning more in one direction for some of us than others.

    Most people (cis) probably wouldn't know how to answer. It's something they take for granted and seems simple. Just because the definition of sex and gender align for them, though, doesn't mean it does for all of us. Their example is no more valid than yours or mine. How we identify might be different if we lived in a culture with three or more genders, for example. Or a thousand years ago.

    Perhaps gender is more like a map, or a direction. It's not US, but can be useful for finding ourselves.
     
  11. Mihael

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    Mhm.

    But the baseline identity doesn't change (unless it does). It's hardware. How we see it, maybe, just like a table, a die or something can be viewed form many angles and look different. Perception is so volatile, so elusive.

    Anyway, I don't get how a man and a woman with exactly the same mind differ, besides the look and kind of fertility, and sexism. Assuming of course that we transfer all the mother instincts and lack thereof together with the mind.
     
  12. Cailan

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    I absolutely disagree with this statement. Science has this pretty much down at this point. Social constructs aka "nurture" in the "nature vs nurture" argument isn't nearly as powerful as people think it is.

    In the wake of the horrors of the 1920s and 1930s Eugenics movement, "nurture" was decided to be a primary driver in the formation of personality and gender. Mostly because the science of genetics and behavior was so terribly misused and abused, no one wanted to touch it. Therefore, beginning in the 1940s, everything that went wrong with a child was the parents' fault. Autistic? "Refrigerator mother syndrome." Gay? Must have been either coddled by the mother, or molested as a child.

    However, with hundreds of twin studies and the new levels of genetic studies now possible, science now knows that the majority of who we are is hard-wired into us from birth.

    Yes, the color pink for girls and blue for boys is a social construct. But the very nature of gender is inborn, it is what we are wired to be in the 11th week of pregnancy when the brain is organizing. The vast majority of XX girls get little or no testosterone during this time (11th week), and have a hard-wired female brain. The vast majority of XY males get enough/lots of testosterone and have a hard-wired male brain. That is gender, and that is why the vast majority of the population has their gender match their bodies, the vast majority comfortable in their gender. It's not just social conditioning. Social conditioning is why girls like skirts and boys like pants. That girls aren't supposed to like math and boys aren't supposed to like makeup. Gender, feeling like a boy or a girl, neither, or both, is not something social conditioning can change. Which is obvious because look at how many of us are here for whom social conditioning simply did not work. We who are trans of various types didn't fit because our brains were wired wrong for our bodies.

    It's not politically correct to say so, but in the technical sense of the word, being transgender is a birth defect. It's where the body somehow went wrong in its attempt to create another copy of the species toward. But it being a birth defect in no way makes us less people. I knew a kid in elementary school whose arm ended at his hand. And I know a cop who was born with only a stub of a left arm. Neither is looked down upon for nature's mistake, neither is treated badly. Birth defects aren't something to be ashamed of. It simply is. It happened, and all we can do is move on as best we can. However, society is much more forgiving and accepting of a birth defect they can see than one they can not.
     
  13. Canterpiece

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    Like others have said on this thread, it’s a difficult question. With questions like these, it’s hard to pin down one singular thing that you could define being male and being female with. They’re more a collection of things. For me, I’ve always seen myself as having an androgynous personality but with a leading female side. I’ve thought about gender in the past, and I still think about the topic now and then.

    For a while, I viewed myself as a tomboy sort of character. My mum always thought I was going to be born AMAB, so when it turned out I was a girl she was quick to try and push me into hobbies she thought I wouldn’t have been interested in if I’d been born male. She wanted me to experience opportunities that she was not able to experience herself, seeing me as an extension of herself in a way. It made me feel like I was just a second attempt, seeing how she also pushed my sister into similar activities but my sister was never particularly good at them either.

    But with me, I mean I am speculating here but it felt like she was trying extra hard with me because she was surprised to have another daughter, which to her might’ve meant another attempt at perhaps connecting and bonding over certain activities that she had unsuccessfully tried to bond over with my sister.

    Due to the disconnection with the scene that my mum tried to promote me into, I started identifying with the label “tomboy”. At this point I was unaware of my mum’s birth predictions, but I remember a conversation I had with my Grandma quite well. She told me that when my mum found out I was a girl, she was hoping that I’d be a proper dolled-up girly girl.

    This caused me to question myself, I didn’t really know who I was anymore. I wondered why I was doing any of this, I wondered if I just saw myself as a tomboy because I wanted to rebel against my mum or something, and I also wondered if what my mum wanted was what I wanted or not, and what was more important.

    I never really felt like I fit in anywhere, part of me didn’t want to upset my mum but I didn’t fit in with the rest of the group. She wanted me to be some elegant ballerina, but I was just some dumb klutz that the other girls laughed at. The only part of dance classes I enjoyed was singing alone under my breath and headbanging to the music even though that wasn’t part of the choreography. :lol:

    In school, I didn’t have much choice when it came to how I presented myself. If I kept my appearance the same, people would make fun of me, but if I changed it then they made fun of me even more. I didn’t fit in at school either, and my lack of interest in certain subjects even made my sister question me if I was Trans or not. Some of my classmates even asked me that too. At one point I even asked myself that.

    At one point, I thought I might be genderfluid, but even that didn’t seem right. Then it hit me. I’d been restricted to how I was able to present myself, and that’s why something felt “off”. After I finished school, I felt a lot more at ease with myself and I could finally wear my hair down without people saying I looked like a wild animal or a slut. Now I’m at College, no one really cares about my hair. In fact, I sometimes get compliments for it.

    During that period of questioning I had, I realised a lot. I realised that a lot of people don’t fall into one extreme or another. I wasn’t a full on complete tomboy, but I didn’t fit into the total girly girl crowd either. I was just somewhere in between, and for once I was ok with that. I also realised that I didn’t see myself as male either, I just couldn’t see myself being male- it didn’t feel right. I liked my body and my high female singing voice, and my feminine features- I realised I wanted to keep those things. Also, recently I’ve started wearing feminine clothing more often- however, my clothing can often vary between more stereotypically male one day, a bit of both the next, and the day after that stereotypically feminine.

    I know when I was in the closet at school I was often very self-conscious of my mannerisms, (particularly the more “male” mannerisms) I went through a phase at one point where I was somewhat obsessed with trying to learn and research into body language (I still think that cats have more logical and easier to understand body language than people do imo, people are strange) and I began to realise that certain actions were deemed more masculine, and others more feminine. Personally, I’d say I have a mixture of both.

    But I know at school I found myself acting in ways I didn’t even think about and sometimes caught myself doing, and I would try and get myself to stop acting in certain ways such as the way I sat etc. Although there were times I’d slip up, especially when I was tired.

    But these mannerisms never made me feel like I was male, despite being seen as more “boyish” body language. My attraction to women never made me feel male either, even though that’s something more associated with guys too. Neither did the dreams that I’ve had where I’ve been male, the weirdest one being was when I was a guy who was insecure about his feminine side. Dreams are odd.

    To me, your true self is who you feel happiest as and who you feel you are. I feel happy within my body because I feel like it fits me, but I can understand why someone might not feel that way. No one can tell you for certain who you are, and that’s the hard part.

    As a Cis person, I am limited in my experience as although I have questioned my gender very briefly, I have not experienced dysphoria (except in dreams, weirdly enough) so there’s only so much I can really say on this topic. I don’t know if this post will be of any use to anyone, seeing as I mostly just aimlessly ranted and talked about myself, but hopefully it was worth the read- I know it’s a long post, keeping posts short isn’t usually a skill set of mine so I apologise for that. :icon_redf
     
    #13 Canterpiece, Feb 23, 2017
    Last edited: Feb 23, 2017
  14. HojaVioleta

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    Absolute bullshit. You get to decide what makes you you, not anyone else. Get your cissexist science out of my gender.
     
  15. dyl pickle

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    For me, it's simply just the fact of knowing. If I feel male, then I go with my instinct that I am male. No matter how stereotypically feminine something is that I like, when I think about being female, it's wrong, terrifying, and just plain terrible (for me, not saying women are terrible lol). Now, if someone says they are male (afab) but never once has experienced dysphoria and never has wanted to wear even slightly masculine clothes, then I get suspicious. However, in the end, if someone wants to be addressed a certain way, it's my personal belief that they should be respected, as long as they aren't harming anyone or the trans* community's legitimacy.
     
  16. Assassin'sKat

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    It has nothing to do with interests. It entirely has to do with how you feel in a male vs a female body. As for the in between, I don't know. But listen. Male and female brains are different and expect their bodies to be a certain way. This is why some people feel wrong in their bodies and experience dysphoria. It has nothing to do with society or gender roles.

    I know I am female because I feel really good in my female body. I feel beautiful.

    ---------- Post added 23rd Feb 2017 at 06:37 PM ----------

    When someone says gender is a social construct, think about this. A trans person would be trans no matter what kind of society they live in. Because it's not a social construct. It has to do with your body.
     
  17. Cailan

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    Science is science and doesn't care about sexism. The evidence leads to the answer. Sorry reality doesn't fit your worldview.
     
  18. StormyVale

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    I think gender is something that both are born with and develop from societal cues. Gender is a filter that we view the world through. It is almost like different colored lenses on sunglasses. Each gender is like a different color of glass that we can see through and it colors our experiences in the world.

    I have had the same problem of questioning if this is really all a phase and I am wrong about my gender. However, I know I am right because when my gender changes, my mannerism change, how I see myself sometimes changes (like I feel I look more male, female, or somewhere in the middle), and how you react emotionally to things.

    Everyone experiences gender differently I think, but I don't think that most people would want to go through transitioning or changing their gender if they were comfortable in the gender assigned at birth. I don't think I would have chosen to be a different gender, but here we are and this is me.

    Gender is about who you are inside. I find that my gender can change my perspective of how I see things because when I am male, I relate more to the men in a picture and my brain will tell me that "That person is like you!".
     
  19. Aliscythe

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    I don't think the points of view are mutually exclusive - the opposite, in fact. I think they're co-dependent: because what *societies* define as gender traits are, definitionally ...a social construct. And we *do* define gender traits differently depending on what group we grow up/live/etc in. On the other hand, our personal preferences and traits are very biologically driven as well. So gender alignment (and relative fluidity) exists at the intersection of the two: Where am I vs Where is my contextual society.

    (Edit: And, as implied in my earlier post, I think some/many of those traits exist in subtext and body language that isn't always conscious - which lends credence to the idea of gender being a relative biological alignment with a local social construct and why it's so complicated for people to deal with. If it were just cultural and obvious "boys like blue and girls like pink" - or if it was "here's what science says boys behave like *across cultures*" this whole thing would be a lot more clear cut...but neither of those are true by themselves)
     
    #19 Aliscythe, Feb 23, 2017
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  20. DoriaN

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    My view.

    Gender is based on a few things in relation, but primarily how the brain is wired in relation to the body.

    Part of the problem is that brain chemistry can change, neuroplasticity, so sometimes gender feelings or perceptions shift (especially later in life). Hormones can play a part, and they do induce feelings of 'manhood' and 'womanhood'. There are cases of people having head trauma and having their gender identification changed, rare but existing.


    The best way to tell imo, is if a person is at stark contrast between their body/brain (body dysphoria) and social interaction and projection (social dysphoria). Because most people live in harmony with their body, the idea of having phantom limbs or pursuing major surgery isn't there. Lots of people hate their body or get envious, but they don't actually have the brain wiring telling them it's innately wrong (Though it's easy to introspect a lot and eventually tell yourself this is the case, depends on motive).


    While I do feel multiple elements can play a role in being satisfied with one's gender, I think the only real unifying element is the need for personal augmentation.
    Because we know that within intersex individuals the biology can be in every direction; it really comes down to how they want their body to align with what their brain says they are (In spite of their own feelings, one reason why there is many suicides is because many do not want to transition, they get a diagnosis and it plagues them). Sometimes even for intersex individuals they are indifferent, and embrace the fact that they are a special case (rare).


    Gender itself is not a social construct, otherwise feeling male or female would be superfluous (De-legitimizing the objective feeling of male/female). What is a social construct is gender expression (to a degree), ie; clothes, makeup, hobbies, etc. While gender expression is partly tied to gender, it does not strictly represent it (Though those having atypical interests may find they commonly share traits that might be gender ambiguous, many transition based on the fact they relate expression to their identity seeing a deeper issue within).


    I do believe there are key qualities of being a man or a woman, but it can be a bit controversial. By nature (on average), men are stronger, taller, they are equipped to lay aside emotion for the sake of pursuing an objective, they innately want to protect and expand their domain. Women are softer, smaller, more equipped to dealing with multiple situations and being good at managing, the emotions are more expressive but they are also done very robustly, perhaps to achieve a goal. They are very good keepers of a domain.


    Because of these biological differences, we also perceive many things as being 'for boys' or being 'for girls'. From observation and experience, we understand some things just suit boys more and some things suit girls more. It's really poetic when you think about it. We're equal (overall), but different.


    Again, there is no hard or fast rule as of this time, but men and women are fundamentally different, so there will be fundamental differences. The more of these differences align on one side, the more clear the gender becomes, but again there can be crossover so I believe it really comes down to the brain and what signals it is sending to the body. How you reciprocate with others and how your body 'moves'.


    There is a lot of misinformation around and political propaganda, so I think a plethora of people get confused or sucked in on these issues (Some de-transition videos are very unfortunate/pitiful, but it's important to be educated and realize what it means to be transsexual). Of course it's not politically correct to say as such these days; but I'd rather be hated for the truth and be loved for the lie.


    These are my current feelings, thank you for those who took the time to read.