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This is about a persons sex, their maleness of femaleness. "Gender" really isn't the right word. Gender used to just mean the maleness or femaleness of words. This definition also says it has to do with biological sex based on reproductive organs and functions. And it can mean identity.
Summary: Our notions about "male" and "female" are naive. If we had 10 or 50 or 100 words for the different sexes, they'd still be naive, although less so. We don't even have statistics about how well genitalia predicts the different aspects of sex-characteristics because our cultural biases lead to people hiding some of them, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not.
All that really matters when you deal with people is their identity.
Why do people wear makeup? Do they want to look "good" or pretty? Do they want to attractive a mate or just feel attractive? Or maybe they want to express their sexuality. Or maybe just their energy or mood. Or is it just fashion or to get the approval of friends or parents. Or maybe they're covering up something that they think is unsightly or that others have reacted negatively about.
Why do people wear skimpy clothing? It could be many of the same things. Or maybe they like feeling exposed, or honest. Maybe they just get hot easily and want to stay cool.
Even if they want to dress "sexy", it doesn't mean it matches your idea of sexy- it just makes them feel that way.
This is in reaction to a friend who wrote on Facebook:
Gender is determined solely by plumbing. If you have a penis and testicles, you're a male. If you have a vagina and uterus, you're a female. That's the definition of male and female.Applying makeup, wearing dresses, etc. is nothing more than localized social convention. ... (over 4 paragraphs) ...
...Social conventions come and go. Physiological differences are just immutable facts, truth and reality.
Dear friend,
Your friends know you're sort of simple and dense in some ways, and complex and even wise in others. Thanks for your public display of humanity. (Similarly, I'll air a bit of my nerdiness...)
To my knowledge, in every society, men and women differentiate. It's a mental thing much more than a plumbing thing. There's a high correlation with plumbing, which people can see, so many people think the plumbing is the truth.
Really, it's your truth about plumbing that is actually a cultural myth. You grew up with it and internalized it and now it feels right. Your confusing your feelings of certainty with truth. It's a common mistake, but it's a mistake.
It's true that most people have one kind of plumbing or the other, and about one in 60 have ambiguous genitalia. Note that male and female genitalia correspond roughly to a host of characteristics, not just XX or XY chromosomes that also roughly correlate with male and female.
And "correspond" might mean it goes along with 60% or it might mean 99%. Note that even genitalia are ambiguous in 1.7% of humans. It might be that there's no aspect of, say, maleness that corresponds with genitalia at 99%. Get used to it.
What genitalia you have means one thing- what genitalia you have.
What "male" and "female" mean are purely subjective. They're very much cultural, or as you said, based on "social convention", and they're also judgement calls. And even then, lots of people realize they're gross simplifications. They're approximations.
You are right that "social conventions" dominate. I call them "culture". But if you look a bit more deeply, you'll see that they define not just our fashions and expressions of sex. They determine the very ideas we think with.
We think there are men and women, males and females, precisely because we have words for them. While there were words 45 years ago, when I was a kid, for gays and queers and lesbians, I didn't know them, so the first time I heard about them, in college, I was blindsided and grossed out. The hole thing seemed just wrong.
But that wrongness was just a cultural phenomenon. It was just what I knew and thus, how my brain had organized my world. Most millennials grew up in a culture with all sorts of folk on TV, and even bisexual aliens! Their world is very different from your plumbing-dominated world.
Friend, you use a lot of brain power in your tech work. Use a bit more of that with people. If we gave you a sex transplant and even hormone treatment, you'd still feel like a guy. The hormones might give you a bit more appreciation for being a female, but it wouldn't change your identity.
Well, it might. You raised a girl, so you probably at some point tended to babies and played with dolls and helped dress them. But you did it with your rigid sense of maleness and femaleness. Maybe there are "female" things that you like that you never gave a real chance. Maybe a little hormone treatment would help you discover them. Lots of guys report trying gay sex, but not being interested- they tried it once. While you may feel certain, you really don't know what you're capable of.
Some people are born with both sets of "plumbing", yet many of them feel they're male, and many feel they're female. Many feel sort of in between or neither. Other people are born with plumbing that doesn't match their sense of self. Others are born with plumbing and ID that match, yet they're attracted to the same sex. Some are born completely male in every way except for the clothes they want to wear. For some, it's women's shoes. Some men think they're extremely male, but like to shop.
I asked a guy I worked with why he wore an earring. I could never
do that! He said he had been in the military and he intensely
wanted to stop being regimented. Of course, I found it hard to
accept. Body piercing?
And then there's the makeup thing. I prefer women without makeup. There's just something about goop and paint that seems wrong. Apparently a lot of people agree, though it's certainly a minority.
There's even a movie called "Asexual" about people who mostly like people, but just never want to have sex with others. I found interesting that they identified several fundamental aspects of sexuality that are spectra, continuums. People are very different on the frequency they want sex. Some don't want to be touched, but like to masturbate with their partner. Some want to do it alone.
My guess is that all these different ways of expressing sexuality worked in different ways, in different times and in different cultures, so they were reinforced differently. Some, such as frequency of sex desired, simply didn't make much of a difference with population survival, so anything was okay. In fact, since gay people like to be parents and are influenced by cultural norms, it makes sense that homosexual tendencies didn't die out. They're not "wrong", according to evolution.
There are actually a ton of differences that societies think of as "male" or "female" and none of them match all their males and females exactly. Some even give all their nouns gender in their languages. But even one language doesn't agree with other languages that do it.
40,000 years ago, when humans lived in tribes and there were many fewer people, they might not have had such rigid male/female notions. We simply don't know. We do know there have often been communities where they were blurred, just as they are in San Francisco now.
What's right is what's moral. Most societies have morality about treating people well and fairly, and about honesty and respect. These are good. Humans make mistakes, so their also needs to be tolerance and appropriate punishments.
Many cultures also have enshrined some of their peculiar practices, including limits on sex and sexuality and how males and females behave. Lots of orthodox Moslems and Jews think women's faces and bodies should be well hidden. Lots of Christians did too, until recently. Some still do.
Many have confused these practices with truth. They feel right, so think it is right. You seem to have that about sex and genitalia. Genitalia doesn't mean anything else. Your feelings of certainty is a great guide to your feelings, not to the truth.
I suggest just letting people be people. Let people define themselves if they want. Enjoy it, without making it mean more than it does. In fact, it might just be something they're trying out. After all, they're not expressing themselves, they're expressing themselves in their little corner of our weird culture.
And, I suggest letting the truth be much more complex than you're comfortable with. Most people find at first it lets them be comfortable with more. And later, it lets them enjoy more. Naw- that was BS. I don't know what most people find. But it works for me. And I feel certain that it'll work for most people. Brain scientists tell us that the brain is far more changable than we've suspected...
I suggest just letting people be people. And if you're curious about a gender, ask. We live in a culture where people are coming to accept a ton of differences, including that some people are very rigid in their thinking. People might even enjoy telling you about themselves.
Note though, if they tell you to fuck off, technically that's not consent. YMMV
Plus, if you really want to know the truth about sexuality:
It takes a village, people.
In truth, I try hard to match my thinking to how I am. And in truth, I'm human, and prone to errors.