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this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2025
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I don't know, I would not say that I knew automatically when I was born what's the difference between "man" and "woman". Of course I have had clear feelings and preferences about a variety of topics, some instinctive and well defined, ever since I was born. But I don't think that's determined by a label. They clearly can fall into a particular label, but only "after the fact".
To me, "man" and "woman" can't be labels that go beyond the social/behavioral because I don't know what it feels like to be a man anymore than what I know it feels like to be a woman.. I only know myself, I can't possibly compare what I feel to what others feel, because those feelings are a "qualia" that cannot be simply be transmitted with words.
And without communication to compare and reference, I could not judge whether what I feel is "man" or "woman" at the level that you choose to do it. To me it's logically impossible to set a gender at such a deep level.
An analogy would be how I can never be sure that other people experience the same thing I experience when we both see and point to the color "green". "Green" is a construct based on our common understanding of the experience a particular wavelength that is emitted by an object we are pointing to. But the label "green" cannot go beyond that external consensus, because what I experience when the impulses caused by that wavelength reach my brain could perfectly be different than what you experience when that same wavelength causes yours.
We might even agree on what are the wavelengths that we call green, based on our own internal experience, because the experience I feel when seeing green might be similar every time I see green (and the same will happen for you)... but that does not mean that we are both having the same experience, it could be that what you experience as blue I experience as green and that what you experience as green I experience as blue, and yet every time we would agree on calling the same wavelengths the same way, because we would have learned to call them that way.
So it would be meaningless to say beyond any social agreement that I deeply think that this color should be "green" only based on my experience alone, because it would not be any different from saying that this color should be "blue"... the only thing that makes us both agree on calling a particular color experience as green and not blue is the social understanding of that experience matching a common external pattern we both agree on, and that we each match it with our respective (and possibly different) subjective experiences (qualia) when we see that color.
Nor did I. For me, it came around the same time I started to understand gender and sex. The more I understood it, the more I knew it was wrong.
For me, it was initially tied in the physical. I knew my body should have been different. I wished it was different. I dreamed, prayed, hoped and fantasized that it would be different. It was an awareness that I was "like them" with girls and "not like them" with boys. I knew it was wrong when I was grouped with boys.
That's what it felt like. Not an understanding of others peoples experiences, but an understanding of how my own sense of self was at odds with both my body, and the assumptions that my body created in people.
For someone who doesn't feel gender, then of course you aren't going to understand the experience of folk who do, anymore than I can understand what it's like to not feel it. All I can is that analogies about colour aren't particularly apt here, because it doesn't work like that. My gender doesn't exist because of shared consensus (although it is shaped by that consensus). My gender doesn't exist because I was able to understand other peoples experiences. My gender is just something I've always felt, and that I've tried to make sense of over the years. I describe it now in clear, defined terms, but when I was younger, it didn't work like that. I knew my body was wrong, but the social stuff, the gender stuff? Finding the words for that would take decades. But even as I said, I was finding the words to describe an experience that was always there.
The experience you describe requires interaction with other people who you (and society) categorizes as "girls" and "boys".
Without this interaction with this external categorization: would you have been able to find anything was "different"?
I feel that in order to have something feel "different" you need to have something to compare it to. Something you can perceive from others and that thus it must be reflected externally and not just something purely internal at the level of qualia (otherwise you wouldn't be able to compare it). So this is what I meant by archetype/label/stereotype/pick-your-word. That thing you felt was different which you perceived when comparing with other people outside of yourself.
Yes.
The words I use to describe it would be different. If I grew up on an island of men, I'd have been completely lost trying to understand it, and may never have found the words, but I would still have felt it, because I was already feeling it before I had the words.
Trans people are real. Our experience of gender is real. Those experiences don't align with yours, but that doesn't stop them being real. Trans people exist in one form or another, across every civilisation, and have done so through the length of recorded history.
You won't find a "gotcha". You won't make other folks experience match yours, just because you don't understand theirs.
In an island of men (not women) you would be exposed to the same different external behaviors and preferences associated to the archetype that you do not identify with, so of course you would feel a difference.
These external behaviors and preferences you perceive as different is what I was referring to with archetype/label/stereotype/pick-your-word.
Stop trying to tell me my own experience. You don't experience gender. Stop trying to speak for people who do.
Sorry, I was just agreeing with what you said in your second paragraph. Because it makes complete logical sense what you said there. So the "of course you would" was just a reaffirmation of what you described yourself, not a mandate over what you should feel.
Also, I do experience gender, just the same way as I experience color, taste, pain, happiness and all other experiences. I tried to explain it when I gave the example with "green" before. I experience green.. what I don't know is if "what it feels like" to experience green for me could really be identified with "green" beyond the social understanding I have from my interactions with other people when we see green.