What is Gender Even??

Someone wrote…

What is gender even?? Pink and blue?? Makeup??? Smelling like sweat and tears if you’re feeling manly and a flower meadow when you’re feeling feminine?????

What mental differences do men and women have, and where do genderqueer folk fall?? What is the difference between penne pasta and ziti??? Is it really so random or like are there actual answers???

What’s your experience?

And what are you thinking about gender right now?


Posted by on August 25th, 2015 at 08:00 am

Category: your voice 3 comments »

3 Responses to “What is Gender Even??”

  1. Charlie22

    I think it’s important to think about but I also think that since one of the aspects of gender is our intimate internal lives that there likely won’t ever be a full consensus. Gender may only exist as an emergent quality of particular systems and therefore have a variety of causes(things that contribute to it’s emergence).
    In all the time that humans have asked ourselves big questions we have come up with lots of great and interesting ideas. But, there’s no answer key for us to check against. We can’t agree on the nature of the self, on what the self is, or a myriad of other philosophical questions. Ultimately, gender is at least to some extent of the self and for that reason we may never feel like all our questions have been answered.
    I’m not so sure gender is a thing in the same way the moon is a thing (objectively and clearly observable). It may be a thing in a way more similar to the way words are (changeable and context dependent). I do know that I experience dissonance when asked to present and be particular ways on the basis of a sex/gender that I don’t feel connected to. That’s the greater part of what I’m going on right now when I ask myself what gender means in my life and what mine is.

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  2. Matthew/Melisa

    The answer is 42.

    Jokes aside, I think that gender has no need to exist, the same way that time doesn’t have to exist and the alphabet doesn’t have to be in alphabetical order.it’s a misconception of biological sex forcing someone to think and act like what our sex determines. If every one could see the difference between sex and gender, there’d be no need for the latter, and we’d be leaps and bounds ahead in terms of social accept ion for transsexuals.

    On a darker note, maybe genderqueer people (myself included) are just a bunch of perverts who get off by cross-dressing. If I insulted anyone, which is very likely, I apologize, but would rather laugh at something as depressing and likely unchanging (in my lifetime anyways) as social views on gender than let it get me down.

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  3. Anonymous

    I would reframe the question: Which aspects of gender are real, and which are invented.

    “Pink is for girls and blue is for boys” – Invented. Around 1946 by fashion marketing people.

    “Girls are gentler than boys” – Maybe partially true???

    [Reply]


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