Gender: inchoate thought

Most of my thoughts on gender these days are tentative and inchoate, for which I am grateful to the Tiptree Motherboard and my fellow jurors for offering me a consciousness-raising project (not labeled as such).

There's a "my gender presentation is" meme going around, with a couple of hundred options. Some of those strike me as fitting better into boxes labeled as "sexual orientation" or "political position." Some I could check, but my thought was "my gender presentation is irrelevant in any context where you have to ask." This connects to rysmiel's deliberate obfuscation of zir gender online "because it matters that it should not matter." (If you can't tell whether you're attracted to me without knowing the answer to that question, fine—I can't tell whether I'm attracted to you until we've spent time together, even if you tell me your gender and provide photos and audiotapes.)

I think my gender presentation is "passing." Not passing as a woman, or a man: passing as someone who understands gender. That most people would take one look at me and say "female" (and the ones who automatically come up with the other answer and call me "sir" apologize when they hear my voice or see my chest) is only tangent to the relevant arc [1]. It's like the forms in Northern Ireland that would ask, not about actual religion/ethnicity [2] but whether the person would "be perceived as" Catholic or Protestant. When Rysmiel and papersky told me about those, I said I would need a "don't know" box, and they both confidently told me that, in that context, I would be perceived as Protestant. "Woman" doesn't feel actively wrong the way "Protestant" does, because to the extent that I do have an understanding of what that means, there's significant overlap. A woman is a person who [cares that she] is assigned certain pronouns, who has certain phenotypic characteristics, who has no Y chromosome (and usually two X chromosomes), who is expected to play certain roles (which vary with time, location, and subculture), and probably several other things.

I'm not so much trying to pass, as only resisting the parts of the mold that don't fit. I like long hair and dangly earrings, I don't much care for skirts, I won't wear high-heeled shoes. Where I object to the roles, it's usually on feminist grounds--not "I don't fit in that box, I fit in the other one" but "Dividing people into two boxes for this purpose is stupid and oppressive."

[1] I almost wrote "tangent to the relevant point" and then realized that the geometrically meaningful image was probably better than the metaphoric use of "point."

[2] The two concepts being more entwined there than in some other places; in New York "ethnically Catholic" seems weird, but "ethnically Jewish" does not.

Gender: inchoate thought

Most of my thoughts on gender these days are tentative and inchoate, for which I am grateful to the Tiptree Motherboard and my fellow jurors for offering me a consciousness-raising project (not labeled as such).

There's a "my gender presentation is" meme going around, with a couple of hundred options. Some of those strike me as fitting better into boxes labeled as "sexual orientation" or "political position." Some I could check, but my thought was "my gender presentation is irrelevant in any context where you have to ask." This connects to rysmiel's deliberate obfuscation of zir gender online "because it matters that it should not matter." (If you can't tell whether you're attracted to me without knowing the answer to that question, fine—I can't tell whether I'm attracted to you until we've spent time together, even if you tell me your gender and provide photos and audiotapes.)

I think my gender presentation is "passing." Not passing as a woman, or a man: passing as someone who understands gender. That most people would take one look at me and say "female" (and the ones who automatically come up with the other answer and call me "sir" apologize when they hear my voice or see my chest) is only tangent to the relevant arc [1]. It's like the forms in Northern Ireland that would ask, not about actual religion/ethnicity [2] but whether the person would "be perceived as" Catholic or Protestant. When Rysmiel and papersky told me about those, I said I would need a "don't know" box, and they both confidently told me that, in that context, I would be perceived as Protestant. "Woman" doesn't feel actively wrong the way "Protestant" does, because to the extent that I do have an understanding of what that means, there's significant overlap. A woman is a person who [cares that she] is assigned certain pronouns, who has certain phenotypic characteristics, who has no Y chromosome (and usually two X chromosomes), who is expected to play certain roles (which vary with time, location, and subculture), and probably several other things.

I'm not so much trying to pass, as only resisting the parts of the mold that don't fit. I like long hair and dangly earrings, I don't much care for skirts, I won't wear high-heeled shoes. Where I object to the roles, it's usually on feminist grounds--not "I don't fit in that box, I fit in the other one" but "Dividing people into two boxes for this purpose is stupid and oppressive."

[1] I almost wrote "tangent to the relevant point" and then realized that the geometrically meaningful image was probably better than the metaphoric use of "point."

[2] The two concepts being more entwined there than in some other places; in New York "ethnically Catholic" seems weird, but "ethnically Jewish" does not.