gender Shar My mom makes the money at my house. My roommate was raised by his stay-at-home dad. Gay couples don't need a masculine role and a feminine role. I'm not looking to marry a man to provide for me. I can provide for myself. My sister played junior high football. She was a linebacker. Boys can cook great dinners. Don't let your chromosomes define who you are. You'd miss out on so much. 001106 ... the spork thank you Shar. all of us who have ever bent or broken what we were taught about gender-specific behaviour thank you. Sincerely, The big scary hetero guy who likes to cook, likes to wear make-up when he goes out, can carry on a conversation about interior design, automatic weapons, multiple genres of music and would rather shop for clothes or trivial bullshit but still knows his way around the hardware and auto parts store, likes to be romantic but still enjoys topless dancers and porn. (yeah, my dad would hate to hear me say all of that..but oh well.) 001106 ... splinken romantics ALWAYS like topless dancers and porn. watchoo talkin bout willis? 001107 ... j_blue gender is weird, but kinda cool, but only when used as a relative scale, and not a rule. what i mean is that gender gives us masculine and feminine, which is good. gender does not define how you or i lead our lives though, we do that ourselves. acknowledging this fact and carrying the resoning forward, and hoping the full mind realizes whats going on and not just the intellect, we come to the conclusion that gender also does not define how other people lead their lives either. sounds simple, but the problems caused by the word, are actually part of a broader problem which arises from words in general. put simply, words do not define our reality, they describe it, or at least they were meant to. and in my opinion, should. 001107 ... tourist Not that I speak it, but I know that spanish is a language that is loaded with gender Bias even where there is no apparent gender appllication. It is bound to have an effect ., I agree with the hypothesis that words describe reality but do they not also shape it? In the novel 1984 the government was destroying old words and replacing them with NEWSPEAK so that the concept of dissatisfaction or rebelion would become impossible to express. The Womans movement and political correctness have likewise taken a similar approach. I beleive that language can create changes in society, hopefully for the better. 001128 ... misstree ranting again but at the same time, language is shaped by society... it's a tug of war, language trying to edit things out... postal workers instead of mailmen, things like that... "he" as the default article... it is changing, thank the gods... i wrote a paper for a gender sociology class on how i hadn't been gender socialized (the opposite of the assignment)... the five horsemen: media, peers, school, family, government. my arguments: alternative media, no friends, alienated in school, strange family. 'course, at the end, i said i was full of shite--of course i've been gender socialized, no one can avoid it--i wear make up and skirts, don't like bugs or sports, stuff like that... but i think that breaking free of what we're told to be and finding what we really want is important... there is a growing acceptance/admiration of androgyny that i think is beautiful... bois that look like girls, girls that look like boys, people being more true to themselves... hooray for boys in skirts and women in sports! yum. :) 001128 ... stark no bother for the other or the like the same they all play the same game 010227 ... thea i'd like to be a guy. 020820 ... Sam Vaknin Alan Pease, author of a book titled "Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps", believes that women are spatially-challenged compared to men. The British firm, Admiral Insurance, conducted a study of half a million claims. They found that "women were almost twice as likely as men to have a collision in a car park, 23 percent more likely to hit a stationary car, and 15 percent more likely to reverse into another vehicle" (Reuters). Yet gender "differences" are often the outcomes of bad scholarship. Consider Admiral insurance's data. As Britain's Automobile Association (AA) correctly pointed out - women drivers tend to make more short journeys around towns and shopping centers and these involve frequent parking. Hence their ubiquity in certain kinds of claims. Regarding women's alleged spatial deficiency, in Britain, girls have been outperforming boys in scholastic aptitude tests - including geometry and maths - since 1988. On the other wing of the divide, Anthony Clare, a British psychiatrist and author of "On Men" wrote: "At the beginning of the 21st century it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that men are in serious trouble. Throughout the world, developed and developing, antisocial behavior is essentially male. Violence, sexual abuse of children, illicit drug use, alcohol misuse, gambling, all are overwhelmingly male activities. The courts and prisons bulge with men. When it comes to aggression, delinquent behavior, risk taking and social mayhem, men win gold." Men also mature later, die earlier, are more susceptible to infections and most types of cancer, are more likely to be dyslexic, to suffer from a host of mental health disorders, such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and to commit suicide. In her book, "Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man", Susan Faludi describes a crisis of masculinity following the breakdown of manhood models and work and family structures in the last five decades. In the film "Boys don't Cry", a teenage girl binds her breasts and acts the male in a caricatural relish of stereotypes of virility. Being a man is merely a state of mind, the movie implies. But what does it really mean to be a "male" or a "female"? Are gender identity and sexual preferences genetically determined? Can they be reduced to one's sex? Or are they amalgams of biological, social, and psychological factors in constant interaction? Are they immutable lifelong features or dynamically evolving frames of self-reference? Certain traits attributed to one's sex are surely better accounted for by cultural factors, the process of socialization, gender roles, and what George Devereux called "ethnopsychiatry" in "Basic Problems of Ethnopsychiatry" (University of Chicago Press, 1980). He suggested to divide the unconscious into the id (the part that was always instinctual and unconscious) and the "ethnic unconscious" (repressed material that was once conscious). The latter is mostly molded by prevailing cultural mores and includes all our defense mechanisms and most of the superego. So, how can we tell whether our sexual role is mostly in our blood or in our brains? The scrutiny of borderline cases of human sexuality - notably the transgendered or intersexed - can yield clues as to the distribution and relative weights of biological, social, and psychological determinants of gender identity formation. The results of a study conducted by Uwe Hartmann, Hinnerk Becker, and Claudia Rueffer-Hesse in 1997 and titled "Self and Gender: Narcissistic Pathology and Personality Factors in Gender Dysphoric Patients", published in the "International Journal of Transgenderism", "indicate significant psychopathological aspects and narcissistic dysregulation in a substantial proportion of patients." Are these "psychopathological aspects" merely reactions to underlying physiological realities and changes? Could social ostracism and labeling have induced them in the "patients"? The authors conclude: "The cumulative evidence of our study ... is consistent with the view that gender dysphoria is a disorder of the sense of self as has been proposed by Beitel (1985) or Pfäfflin (1993). The central problem in our patients is about identity and the self in general and the transsexual wish seems to be an attempt at reassuring and stabilizing the self-coherence which in turn can lead to a further destabilization if the self is already too fragile. In this view the body is instrumentalized to create a sense of identity and the splitting symbolized in the hiatus between the rejected body-self and other parts of the self is more between good and bad objects than between masculine and feminine." Freud, Kraft-Ebbing, and Fliess suggested that we are all bisexual to a certain degree. As early as 1910, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld argued, in Berlin, that absolute genders are "abstractions, invented extremes". The consensus today is that one's sexuality is, mostly, a psychological construct which reflects gender role orientation. Joanne Meyerowitz, a professor of history at Indiana University and the editor of The Journal of American History observes, in her recently published tome, "How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States", that the very meaning of masculinity and femininity is in constant flux. Transgender activists, says Meyerowitz, insist that gender and sexuality represent "distinct analytical categories". The New York Times wrote in its review of the book: "Some male-to-female transsexuals have sex with men and call themselves homosexuals. Some female-to-male transsexuals have sex with women and call themselves lesbians. Some transsexuals call themselves asexual." So, it is all in the mind, you see. This would be taking it too far. A large body of scientific evidence points to the genetic and biological underpinnings of sexual behavior and preferences. The German science magazine, "Geo", reported recently that the males of the fruit fly "drosophila melanogaster" switched from heterosexuality to homosexuality as the temperature in the lab was increased from 19 to 30 degrees Celsius. They reverted to chasing females as it was lowered. The brain structures of homosexual sheep are different to those of straight sheep, a study conducted recently by the Oregon Health & Science University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Sheep Experiment Station in Dubois, Idaho, revealed. Similar differences were found between gay men and straight ones in 1995 in Holland and elsewhere. The preoptic area of the hypothalamus was larger in heterosexual men than in both homosexual men and straight women. According an article, titled "When Sexual Development Goes Awry", by Suzanne Miller, published in the September 2000 issue of the "World and I", various medical conditions give rise to sexual ambiguity. Congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), involving excessive androgen production by the adrenal cortex, results in mixed genitalia. A person with the complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS) has a vagina, external female genitalia and functioning, androgen-producing, testes - but no uterus or fallopian tubes. People with the rare 5-alpha reductase deficiency syndrome are born with ambiguous genitalia. They appear at first to be girls. At puberty, such a person develops testicles and his clitoris swells and becomes a penis. Hermaphrodites possess both ovaries and testicles (both, in most cases, rather undeveloped). Sometimes the ovaries and testicles are combined into a chimera called ovotestis. Most of these individuals have the chromosomal composition of a woman together with traces of the Y, male, chromosome. All hermaphrodites have a sizable penis, though rarely generate sperm. Some hermaphrodites develop breasts during puberty and menstruate. Very few even get pregnant and give birth. Anne Fausto-Sterling, a developmental geneticist, professor of medical science at Brown University, and author of "Sexing the Body", postulated, in 1993, a continuum of 5 sexes to supplant the current dimorphism: males, merms (male pseudohermaphrodites), herms (true hermaphrodites), ferms (female pseudohermaphrodites), and females. Intersexuality (hermpahroditism) is a natural human state. We are all conceived with the potential to develop into either sex. The embryonic developmental default is female. A series of triggers during the first weeks of pregnancy places the fetus on the path to maleness. In rare cases, some women have a male's genetic makeup (XY chromosomes) and vice versa. But, in the vast majority of cases, one of the sexes is clearly selected. Relics of the stifled sex remain, though. Women have the clitoris as a kind of symbolic penis. Men have breasts (mammary glands) and nipples. The Encyclopedia Britannica 2003 edition describes the formation of ovaries and testes thus: "In the young embryo a pair of gonads develop that are indifferent or neutral, showing no indication whether they are destined to develop into testes or ovaries. There are also two different duct systems, one of which can develop into the female system of oviducts and related apparatus and the other into the male sperm duct system. As development of the embryo proceeds, either the male or the female reproductive tissue differentiates in the originally neutral gonad of the mammal." Yet, sexual preferences, genitalia and even secondary sex characteristics, such as facial and pubic hair are first order phenomena. Can genetics and biology account for male and female behavior patterns and social interactions ("gender identity")? Can the multi-tiered complexity and richness of human masculinity and femininity arise from simpler, deterministic, building blocks? Sociobiologists would have us think so. For instance: the fact that we are mammals is astonishingly often overlooked. Most mammalian families are composed of mother and offspring. Males are peripatetic absentees. Arguably, high rates of divorce and birth out of wedlock coupled with rising promiscuity merely reinstate this natural "default mode", observes Lionel Tiger, a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University in New Jersey. That three quarters of all divorces are initiated by women tends to support this view. Furthermore, gender identity is determined during gestation, claim some scholars. Milton Diamond of the University of Hawaii and Dr. Keith Sigmundson, a practicing psychiatrist, studied the much-celebrated John/Joan case. An accidentally castrated normal male was surgically modified to look female, and raised as a girl but to no avail. He reverted to being a male at puberty. His gender identity seems to have been inborn (assuming he was not subjected to conflicting cues from his human environment). The case is extensively described in John Colapinto's tome "As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl". HealthScoutNews cited a study published in the November 2002 issue of "Child Development". The researchers, from City University of London, found that the level of maternal testosterone during pregnancy affects the behavior of neonatal girls and renders it more masculine. "High testosterone" girls "enjoy activities typically considered male behavior, like playing with trucks or guns". Boys' behavior remains unaltered, according to the study. Yet, other scholars, like John Money, insist that newborns are a "blank slate" as far as their gender identity is concerned. This is also the prevailing view. Gender and sex-role identities, we are taught, are fully formed in a process of socialization which ends by the third year of life. The Encyclopedia Britannica 2003 edition sums it up thus: "Like an individual's concept of his or her sex role, gender identity develops by means of parental example, social reinforcement, and language. Parents teach sex-appropriate behavior to their children from an early age, and this behavior is reinforced as the child grows older and enters a wider social world. As the child acquires language, he also learns very early the distinction between "he" and "she" and understands which pertains to him- or herself." So, which is it - nature or nurture? There is no disputing the fact that our sexual physiology and, in all probability, our sexual preferences are determined in the womb. Men and women are different - physiologically and, as a result, also psychologically. Society, through its agents - foremost amongst which are family, peers, and teachers - represses or encourages these genetic propensities. It does so by propagating "gender roles" - gender-specific lists of alleged traits, permissible behavior patterns, and prescriptive morals and norms. Our "gender identity" or "sex role" is shorthand for the way we make use of our natural genotypic-phenotypic endowments in conformity with social-cultural "gender roles". Inevitably as the composition and bias of these lists change, so does the meaning of being "male" or "female". Gender roles are constantly redefined by tectonic shifts in the definition and functioning of basic social units, such as the nuclear family and the workplace. The cross-fertilization of gender-related cultural memes renders "masculinity" and "femininity" fluid concepts. One's sex equals one's bodily equipment, an objective, finite, and, usually, immutable inventory. But our endowments can be put to many uses, in different cognitive and affective contexts, and subject to varying exegetic frameworks. As opposed to "sex" - "gender" is, therefore, a socio-cultural narrative. Both heterosexual and homosexual men ejaculate. Both straight and lesbian women climax. What distinguishes them from each other are subjective introjects of socio-cultural conventions, not objective, immutable "facts". In "The New Gender Wars", published in the November/December 2000 issue of "Psychology Today", Sarah Blustain sums up the "bio-social" model proposed by Mice Eagly, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University and a former student of his, Wendy Wood, now a professor at the Texas A&M University: "Like (the evolutionary psychologists), Eagly and Wood reject social constructionist notions that all gender differences are created by culture. But to the question of where they come from, they answer differently: not our genes but our roles in society. This narrative focuses on how societies respond to the basic biological differences - men's strength and women's reproductive capabilities - and how they encourage men and women to follow certain patterns. 'If you're spending a lot of time nursing your kid', explains Wood, 'then you don't have the opportunity to devote large amounts of time to developing specialized skills and engaging tasks outside of the home'. And, adds Eagly, 'if women are charged with caring for infants, what happens is that women are more nurturing. Societies have to make the adult system work [so] socialization of girls is arranged to give them experience in nurturing'. According to this interpretation, as the environment changes, so will the range and texture of gender differences. At a time in Western countries when female reproduction is extremely low, nursing is totally optional, childcare alternatives are many, and mechanization lessens the importance of male size and strength, women are no longer restricted as much by their smaller size and by child-bearing. That means, argue Eagly and Wood, that role structures for men and women will change and, not surprisingly, the way we socialize people in these new roles will change too. (Indeed, says Wood, 'sex differences seem to be reduced in societies where men and women have similar status,' she says. If you're looking to live in more gender-neutral environment, try Scandinavia.)" 031014 ... neesh recent studies have led me to believe that people tend to define themselves by binary oppositions - man/woman, straight/gay, black/white, ruling class/subjugated class, self/other - but discussing this with friends i also now believe that people also define themselves within this binary model by sameness, and tag themselves onto a group, assimilate themselves into a group, and the whole group distinguishes itself as different from another group. i also believe that this kind of binary distinction for self identification is flawed at best, harmful at worst, to society, to people. so i was just wondering, what alternative frameworks of definition are there? as regards sexuality, for no particular reason i'm happy with the massive pluralism of possible desires that are more specific and more varied that straight/gay. but for gender, i dislike the model of gender by degrees, and the idea of absolute pluralism (ie we're all totally different, there is no classification). luckily a friend was studying gender history, and from him i learnt of two other frameworks - the one-sex model (before scientific developments showed otherwise, people thought men and women were the same, but women had their penis and testes inside and men outside, and believed all people were made up of different constitutions of the four humours, and that it was possible to change constitutions, and so possible to change from masculine to feminine and vice verse (and incidentally from male to female and vice versa)) and the four sex model (a number of north american indian tribes had the following sexes: masculine male, masculine female, feminine male, feminine female, and relationships between any of them were acceptable, but, it seems, not within any of them, so a masculine male could sleep with a feminine male, but not with another masculine male). i quite like the four sex model, and am considering developing my own understanding of gender along these lines. but in liking it, it implies that to me the current model, with the terms masculine, feminine, male and female, are good enough, and that the current model is on the right lines, but not specific enough. and i don't think this is true, i feel that the whole system needs some kind of overhaul. any thoughts anyone? 061222 ... tessa why would four categories be any less damaging than two? 061222 ... neesh good question (but it would also be nice if you suggested an answer with it). i see binarism as something inherently violent. people have through history defined others as lacking and thus themselves as superior by contrast: freud and darwin defined women as lacking, meaning that men were superior. in "the waves" a character says they define themselves as civilised by having savages. gay sex was deemed unnatural, and so straight sex natural. binarism, as far as i can see, is about observing or fabricating a negative in something and setting it up as the opposite of what you are, to assert your own positive nature. binarism is about one group claiming superiority over another. but i think having more than two groups changes the whole relationship. it makes me think of rock paper scissor, where no one kind can claim superiority, and power flows. so in having more than two, the sense that the different 'categories' are in opposition, the way that binary distinctions mostly come down to powerful/powerless, superior/inferior, and other kinds of implications, is taken away, and different groups can't be thought of as in a power struggle, as superior versus inferior, just, simply, as different. ? 061222 ... not tessa all categorisations create a knowledge that is inherently violent. it divides the community into individuals and then recombines individuals into artificially created categories. the "i" becomes supreme and is force to identify with "x" "y" or "z" or else is labelled deviant, undesirable, and institutionalisable. there is no beauty or truth here. however the categories are necessary for human interaction, for human comprehension, and, simply, human existence. people are generally repulsed by the unknowable infinitude unless they mask it in some kind of sad god-like-form and name it (even when claiming not to name it). existence requires boxes, but boxes must be re-cognised as what they are: artificial categorisations. even the words used to speak of this artificiality fall into the same trap, and i am trapped in writing this, always systematising, but knowing that the systems are just that, systems, i can use them with less risk of falling into a universalism or getting trapped in the boxes. though what i just said, itself, traps me in a box of relativity. alas, i am lost. and in being lost found. 061222 ... neesh yes. all categorisation of people is dangerous, and some kind of definitions are necessary, at the very least in defining ourselves so that we have some sense of who we are. and this takes place subconsciously even if we consciously choose not to do it, so i would rather do it consciously and try to improve upon the flaws in my mindset. i am not searching for truth nor beauty here, only self improvement and self awareness. what is an improvement upon binary gender distinction? 061222 ... still not tessa i'd like to attempt to answer that question but have to keep my mind in the land of (in most circumstances) useless abstract philosophy for another few hours. afterwards if i don't immediately pass out from mental fatigue or boycott the written i'll try to give a proper answer. i'm doubtful though. good hunting. 061222 ... neesh thanks 061222 ... misstree my suggestion is not to look at it as a problem with the way that gender is defined but a problem with the binariness of the system. either/or eliminates all other possiblities; either you support bush or you're a terrorist. western logic is built on the yes/no duality, so things like maybe, neither, both, and sort of are not taken as being capable of carrying the absoluteness of yes or no. is water made of hydrogen or oxygen? gender isn't an either/or, or a sliding scale, or even a dartboard; it's a thousand-element periodic table, each person built differently out of these blocks. because someone has lots of metals we say they are male, or lots of gases we say they're female, when really water isn't made of oxygen just because it's a 2:1 ratio. i just woke up, so i'm really hoping this makes some sort of sense, but i won't be able to tell until i restore the coffee to my system. 061222 ... neesh it does make sense. i'm not sure the water analogy holds though, because the periodic table is a large number of exactly defined elements, but masculine and feminine in themselves are 'sort of' terms. masculine can mean animal sex urges or intellectual bodylessness (brain in a jar), or really, both, and other things. i'm not sure if this is the great failing or an advantage of the definitions. i feel the terms need overhauling, but can think of nothing outside them. as for the yes/no duality that underlies binarism, that is absolutely true. in one of the best books i've read recently ("literature after feminism"), the writer (rita felski) constantly attacks the either/or mentality that so limits us, suggesting every time an alternative in the form both/and. i like 'maybe' and 'sort of' being added to the mix, the kind of thing that classical logic doesn't cater for. i should learn about fuzzy logic. however, what i think is a merit of having fewer terms, even if broad and never 100% applicable (no one epitomises the terms, just approximates a mix of them), is that it avoids the post-modern dive into fragmentation. i do love the post-modernists, and find pleasure in the dance with alienation and boundary/category blurring/breaking, but stepping back and looking at the dance, i think to myself "i have no idea who i am", and i'd like to have some idea. what i dislike about the post-modernists is that in breaking down definitions as we have them, they suggest no alternatives, and leave us unable to know ourselves or others. that's why, like i said above, i dislike the idea of absolute pluralism, that everyone's so unique that any kind of grouping is impossible. it may be true (it may not be...), but it isn't helpful. i'd prefer a philosophy on the matter that was useful, just better than the philosophy i had/have. 061223 ... pete has read too much nietzche and heidegger know thy self, children they who know thee not seek to own you through their namings 061223 ... hsg something is not defined by what it is not. categorization is violence to the categorizor's own mind. like putting an octopus in a box but cutting off the legs that don't fit. it's no longer an octopus. a_course_in_miracles has thoroughly described the answer to your quest. nothing means anything. a chair is not a chair. it is simply IT. look at it as though you have never seen it before. you really cannot re-cognize anything. when you look at something and revert back to that_thing_uve_seen_before, then you are no longer looking at reality or objects therein but only at what you already "know". this is the unobservation. it is reverting into oblivion. only violence can occur because when what we have before us doesnt match the categories/labels in which our mind finds security, then we become afraid of loosing our minds... the ego is responsible for this insistance on duality or naming things or raping a piece of original artwork into some boring familiarity. the only way to see clearly, to uncategorize & simply nicely LET_THINGS_BE themselves is to relinquish your clingyness_to_security. to the ego this is the equivalent of suicide because it's very existence depends on fear, illusion, suffering, & a general feeling that it has a pretty good grasp on whats_going_on. "things are either one way or they're not." that is the black and white violence 1/0 binaryness. this is a statement of fear. a perceived need to feel certain otherwise "my wellbeing is at stake." this unhappiness however is completely out phase with the nature of reality... that all things have a deeply innate drive to not be confined to a label. everything wishes to express itself as everything and anything whenever it damned well feels like it! this is reality's emotion, that of unboxment. this thought's expression is a seed unfolding into life. the seed has always been the grandson and the grandfather at the same time. imagination_unlimited is everything's deepest desire. once we give into being afraid_to_imagine, our minds get all facked up. then you're fuct_up_on_facts. and you "grow-up" and "you_understand_violence". fact is, one is afraid_to_be_free until one_understands_completely that imagination_is_all_one_loves_to_be. 061225 ... tessa thank you for your responses misstree, not tessa as has been said, i don't think it is the binarism that is violent, it is the boundary - the line drawn to mark off discrete categories. and i acknowledge the hypocrisy in making statements like the above, it's that word trap misstree was talking/tripping about. it's the relativity i get stuck in - neesh, you are looking for improvement, better answers. these are impossible under complete relativism I think the postmodernists are playing a different game altogether. Their goal is not knowledge, truth or progress. Although sometimes they are mistaken as having these goals, and are then accused of not following the rules. I think the postmodernist endeavour is more like play (but not only the fun type of play, also play as a way of being. a desperate play. playing for survival) 070126 ... daft caterpillar here's something I wrote yesterday, then neglected to blather. It's not entirely true, but it's how I feel sometimes: I've been wondering lately how to negotiate my gender in the world-at-large. I'm female-bodied, and have been playing tomboy-girl for a while (by a while, I mean my entire life), but that starts to get a little sketchy when I start actually passing as a boy. It starts to get strange when I know people who know me as a boy and people who know me as a girl and they're all at the same table. I find myself worrying about passing and presenting as the gender the person I'm talking to knows me as, even though I shouldn't have all that much invested in it. I find myself dressing differently based on who I'll be around that day, and what they think I am. And I guess I realise that I should really just be myself, and fuck what people think of me, but I guess I care, because I can only pull off confused androgyny and fucking with peoples' heads if I'm careful and make sure I'm giving off the right gender signals. Sometimes I want to change gender like hair colour -- not something you do every day, but something that you do from time to time, and some people never dye their hair, but some people do. Often. I guess it just bothers me that gender is supposed to be immutable, and I feel that it's the opposite. On the bus or the subway or at the dollar store, I'll take a "here you go, sir", note it, and move along, but when I'm actually having conversations and introduce myself, I have to pick a name, maybe tell the truth, figure out what they think I am and for some reason I think this is important. I wonder why... Also, I guess it's fucked up that I can pass as a boy and a girl in the same day, without really doing anything (if only in the sense that I get read as a boy casually and virtually everyone I know knows me as a girl, but I can negotiate womens' washrooms without being accosted, and usually without strange looks). The most awkward part is when I get he'd and the people 'in' on my gender start getting really insistent on the female pronouns, and I'm like.. whoa slow down. chillax. Don't worry about it. let it clash a little. Gender? Both? Neither? I don't know. 070212 ... Risen Today I saw a post about gender norms by a woman I used to love... Or someone I thought I loved. But today I saw her ripping into men for not being "real" enough for her. And I was ashamed that I ever let that kind of bigoted thinking anywhere near me. I'm ashamed that I let her hypocrisy go unquestioned. I'm ashamed that I ever thought she considered gender-non-conforming people attractive, let alone acceptable. It's like finding out you used to date a Trump supporter. Today I feel shame. 170620 what's it to you? who go blather from