I am writing this thread with a view to understanding the personal experience of gender in relation to wider cultural processes. So much debate has been sparked in relation to the postmodernist critique of gender, especially Judith Butler’s idea of gender as performance. This has been hightened by JK Rowling’s opposition to transgender women claiming to be ‘real women’.
The politics are complex, involving power dynamics and gender, as highlighted in feminist sociology. However, the psychological aspects of gender are also relevant. This includes the nature of differences between men and women, as well as the experience of how people develop a narrative sense of personal identity.
One aspect which I think is particularly important is the sense of the interplay of masculinity and femininity within oneself. This was recognised in Freud’s particular understanding of bisexuality, which was about gendered aspects of the self, not simply about sexual orientation. Similarly, Jung spoke of the masculinity and femininity as aspects of the human psyche.
What I wonder about is how this translates into lived experience, the psychological and cultural. So much involves projection, which involves the balance of masculinity and feminine in one’s construction of self and a sense of ‘other’. I am raising the topic here to ask how does the sense of personal gender identification involve the psychological dynamics and its translation into the psychological sphere?
Gender is a political term used to promote ideological gender pseudoscience. The correct word to use is ‘sex’. Gender means nothing in a scientific sense regarding human biology. Its use has caused nothing but mayhem.
I find your approach interesting and wonder if you are truly liberated from the bonds of gender identification. Does it mean going beyond the limitations of being a man or woman as biological foundations for human identity?
I do know of people who go beyond the binary of gender through the idea of being non binary, but that is usually with a sense of being a mixture of masculine and feminine. It is still bound up with a sense of attributes of gender. In a way, the whole concept of gender as an aspect of self identity involves attachment, especially related to the body.
As I understand it, the term gender was introduced to differentiate between the meaning of sex as the reproductive act and the social categories corresponding with males and females. It was developed in sociology and has become very political. Feminism was central to this and looked at the politics of gender in power dynamics.
The current debates about gender, especially the criticism of the transgender identities go back to this. It has become heated into cultural wars, which have been generated in social media.
If I went to sleep today and tomorrow I was magically awake controlling and interfacing with a body of the other sex, I would still be me, so what entails is that I’m not my sex either. That’s the classical stance, picture the view of catholicism for example: when people get into heaven, for them they don’t have the same body, but they are there (if not, those people couldn’t get to heaven, since the body doesn’t go). What I point about that is that it is not any new idea at all.
I’m not non-binary nor binary, people identifying with one of them just makes up a binary between people that are non-binary and people that are non non-binary.
I think you mean self identification, not identity. Those are different. That may be the root of things. One thing is who you are, another is who you picture yourself as being. The first matters, the latter doesn’t
I don’t care why it was ‘introduced’. There are several sources, none of which make any sense. Whatever the ‘source’, it still has nothing to do with whether or not a person is male or female.
I agree. You had the old way of raising people where boys and girls were pressed into fitting ideas of their role. If you weren’t masculine enough then you were pressured to not cry or to have the right interests etc. Same with girls. Whatever they are like is what a boy is like and whatever a girl is like that’s what a girl is like.
And now it’s like a bizzarro mirror of the same kind of hatred. Now you’re told that if you’re like X, then you’re probably trans. So we have all these operations and hormone treatments. Etc.
I just wish everyone could just leave the fucking children alone. The old traditional hatred and the new bizzarro hatred of bodies. Just let them be.
I don’t mean like you can’t tell them not to throw their food at the walls. I mean, just keep your ideas of what they should be off them?
Of course, the general hatred of children almost puts a fog on this. All the teaching them to hate their own emotions. All the teaching them that being good is sitting in chairs, eyes forward, quiet until spoken to trained to parrot pedagogy. The religions with all their judgments of what is basically the beast within philosophies.
People hear this and they think: oh, the kids have all the power, run wild. No, adults get to live and protect. No, running in the road. No treating me like shit. This is all very complicated, but the hatred of both boys and girls in the traditional outlook and now this new bizzarro outlook, that’s all gotta stop. Biology is pretty diverse, let’s trust it, except where it’s attacking another and ruining their life.
There is nothing more stereotypical than what we have now. There were always ‘tomboys’ and boys who didn’t do stereotypical ‘boy’ things, but no one ever suggested that they were in the ‘wrong body’. They often grew up to be the complete OPPOSITE of what they were as children. I knew a girl who refused to wear ‘girl’ clothes. If she had been born a bit later then she would likely have been told that she was really a ‘boy’ in the wrong body, and might even have been given puberty blockers. As it turned out she went through puberty as she was supposed to, and is now a grown, perfectly normal straight woman.
I don’t think children work that way. Biology doesn’t just “tell them.” They themselves look for role models, for cues from adults.
Also maybe irregular sexuality in a child almost certainly indicates abuse, which you are ignoring and calling “self expression.” Yeah, they are expressing that somebody is violating them, and you are turning away.
Then not only is gender but sex out the window, tabula rasa. Except I don’t think that’s the case at all. Boys have tendencies and girls have tendencies and that’s coming from their bodies. The twin studies pretty much ended the tabula rasa idea.
Again, you’re personalizing this. You are turning away. Now you said to Mistress Ophelia you were responding to me. But I don’t see what you wrote in the second paragraph as responding to me. Shit, I’m old enough to where most authorities didn’t believe there was much childhood abuse and fought against that idiocy. So, don’t be telling me what I’m doing. But maybe the second paragraph was for her, I dunno. The quote function can be helpful.
I agree. Though there was tremendous pressure on the tom boys at a certain age and some were never allowed to be tomboys. And ‘effeminate’ boys could be in for tremendous abuse both at home and in the world of peers. I am reacting to all the hallucinations of gender both then and now.
I said I agree. Then, Though….I am bringing in the idea that it’s not a recent thing that people try to tweak the genders of children. There was tremendous pressure to act a certain way as a boy/man and a certain way as a girl. It’s as if, often, we trusted biology and since boys and girls were different we didn’t have today’s interventions or strange ideas. Yes, today there can be hormone treatments, surgery even with children and this is horrible. But there was a truly radical gender creation going on in the so-called more traditional 50s, say. Boys/men were trained to be stiff, control emotion extremely in general - except for approved outlets, perhaps sports fandom as one - and move through space in an extremely controlled way. Crying and showing terror would generally be punished after a certain age. Girls/woman had another set of gender expectations aimed at them.
If a 50s couple walked into a current gathering, they would seem like highly stylized almost campy figures and not just to some political group, but to most people.
Biology was not trusted. And violence was there to enforce this especially with males.a
This does not in any way mean that current woke practices are ok. I just want the full picture here.
Keep in mind that what you said about religions works the same for some groups that have an anathema, like people that say that “I’m L+”.
Keep in mind that all the distinctions that are discussed over are secondary characteristics. For example, when you don’t have enough resources, your clothes are not something you choose. If, for any of my ancestors, working the fields was not something very ‘womanly’ and they didn’t like it, you wouldn’t have noticed: they had to do that anyway. The choice of clothes was subordinate to the toil of the day.
Of the cases I personally know, all fit that. How many kids start being abused and end up being artificially neutered?
