sorcyress | X Years Ago Today

One year ago today, it was 2008, and I was (shocking nobody who's ever had an extended conversation with me ever) interested in gender and sexuality.

I also believe I originally meant to post up some thoughts on that poll, ages and ages ago, and then got distracted. At the very least, go fill it out for me if you haven't, okay? Or, if you want to do the really quick and dirty version in the comments of this post...

You list as [gender(s)]:
Explain:

You are attracted to people of [gender(s)]:
Explain:

You consider yourself [poly/mono/etc]:
Explain:

You are currently in relatinships best described as [none/mono/poly/complicated/etc]:
Explain:

And, bonus question, since I forgot it in the original poll:
Your preferred pronoun is:

Seriously. This kind of thing fascinates the hell out of me. Babble¹ about gender and sexuality and stuff like that in the comments, please!

~Sor
MOOP!

1: No, really, Har, Dodger, etc. I like hearing people's thoughts, especially about this. I am encouraging long comments, damnit. Don't let yourself be limited by the thought that I'm going to be overwhelmed --if you're that worried, just toss a one line summery at the bottom for ease of skimming. I promise to read the whole thing though.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"I think gender, like sex, is a (fairly short) linear spectrum with just two poles, not a multidimensional one.

For most people, this seems to be the case, but it also seems to be pretty clearly not the case for a small but significant portion of the population.

It's easy to confuse normality with universality.

What evidence? Please to be showing me.

It is easy to confuse the two, but that's not what I'm doing. Also I read that with a fairly condescending tone to it, I don't know if you intended that.

(Hmm, and here I thought I was being diplomatic...)

There are a large number of traits associated with gender. They are "associated" because, for a majority of the population, a genetic male will have mostly male traits and a genetic female will have mostly female traits.

If you were to plot a scattergram showing the location of each individual (in some large population) in a multidimensional space with one dimension for each of these traits, there would be heavy clustering around two points which would more or less describe the archetypical male and female -- and the line in between these two clusters would also be more densely populated than other areas of the space.

Perhaps this is what you mean by stating that there are only two poles, with a linear spectrum between them. Such a graph would appear as two fuzzy dots with a fuzzy line connecting them. Most people would be in those dots or near that line -- sure.

What it sounded like you were suggesting is that everybody -- or most people, at least, with not enough exceptions to be worth considering as a group -- would be right on a straight, fairly narrow line between those two points, and that the points would be only slightly fuzzy at best.

If you are actually saying the latter, then I'll need to go fetch my evidence, but maybe I just misunderstood you.

Actually I'm not sure which of those I'm saying. I guess to say for sure I'd have to know what that second dimension is and how any outliers would lay very far at all from the line, and perhaps the problem is that I'm unable to think of anything.

The claim I'm defending is that it's "multidimensional", by which I mean "many dimensions", not just two.

Somewhere I started making a list, but I've no idea where it is at the moment, so this is just off the top of my head:

The basics - physical gender, sometimes confusingly called "sex": chromosome configuration (XX/XY/other), genital configuration (not always clear-cut), chest configuration (including functionality of mammary glands), amount of subcutaneous fat, skeletal shape (hip size being the most obvious detail, but there are others), hormone levels, facial and non-pubic body hair amounts, physical strength (especially upper-body).

Behavioral characteristics: "girlyness" (e.g. liking flowers, ponies, kitten) vs. "manlyness" (e.g. liking motorcycles, trucks, guns), passivity vs. aggression, emotional vs. analytical, cooperation vs. confrontation, empathy vs. control, nurturing vs. self-interest...

Attractions: the main two dimensions here are whether you're attracted to men and whether you're attracted to women. (There's a high degree of inverse correlation, and most male-bodied people are attracted to women only, but I should think that the obvious exceptions to this rule alone would prove my point.)

I could go on, but that's the stuff that's easier to explain.

Well, the very simple version is that there's a whole bunch of people around that consider themselves both male and female. And, more importantly, that these two genders don't cancel each other out, but exist independently and without conflict.

Put simply, by defining male and female as opposing ends of a line you make the explicit assumption that they're polar opposites, whereas the evidence I have seen seems to indicate that it's perfectly acceptable to say, have a man who is totally masculine and totally butch, with a fully active femininity. Nothing, I think, about male or female naturally opposes each other at all.

And the reason that I think that this breaks the genderline is because even if you say that a male and female dominant person falls straight in the middle of the spectrum, you've just wiped out the natural position of a person who doesn't cleave to either gender.

I think that at the very least male and female are two axes, not two poles. I'm also fairly certain that there could be other axes that exist, but of course the ones that I think of most people wouldn't exactly consider gender-related (although I think they are to many people's genders - things like sexual identities and BDSM identities).

X Years Ago Today

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