Latest hits: if gender is performative that means it’s fake and patriarchy doesn’t exist! I don’t know who Judith Butler is!
"That's right! It goes in the square hole!"
The fact that it's an evenly split partisan issue with only 0.5% of the population being trans means that you have A LOT of cis allies. Like, statistically, you're more likely to meet several dozens of understanding people than another trans person unless you actively limit your exposure of non-trans people.
There are probably some (not many but some) trans people who conform to binary gender identity beliefs, too, they simply want to be the other gender.
there are so many people out there who can not fathom that the world could in fact be more complex than the version of it presented to them when they were children.
Im a cis person(tho probably not the kind you meant) and i think talking about gender is pretty tiring. I think everyone has their biases and everything but you can make yourself a good person by trying to understand why you have those biasesa at least. And also gender is a prettt complex thing.
If you’re being open minded and respectful even if you don’t understand something (or disengaging if you can’t) then probably 99% of trans people, myself included, aren’t going to have any issue with your questions or contributions to discussions about gender
It’s the (usually cis) people who are at Gender 101 level engagement, think they’re at Gender 501 level engagement, and also want to understand and learn nothing who make this so goddamn tiring 🥲
I got hit with the exact opposite yesterday: "gender cannot be only performative because patriarchy exists and that would mean invalidating people hurt by it"
So tiring
So close yet so far, the entire point is that it's performative and therefore millions of people were hurt for no real reason.
Can you please explain this in simple words to someone not knowing too much about how gender is 'performative' ?
I'm not a native speaker but I'm usually okay but new things needs to be learned :-)
A link is welcomed too ofc!
Stealing the answer because I'm nowhere near as articulate on this matter:
The basic (and simplified) idea is that gender--what we think of as masculine and/or feminine--is performed in the ways we act, speak, dress, move, etc. and doesn't really exist outside of that performance. We learn how to perform this way from dominant culture and conventions--what someone might (incorrectly) call "normal male" or "normal female" behavior. But these "normal" qualities (and genders themselves) don't actually exist--rather, we are all repeatedly mimicking them and are rewarded for doing so (or punished for not doing so). We merely impersonate the qualities we've been taught match the gender we've been told we possess (like females being demure or males being aggressive) until those impersonations (and gender itself) become belief and seen as something natural and assumed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4dddcq/eli5butlers_gender_performativity/
Thank you very much!
Very simple to understand too IMO.
So, in a nutshell, the assertion is that gender is entirely nurture and not nature.
Yeah, sorry, that is an extraordinary assertion and I'm going to need extraordinary proof.
Are there people for whom gender and sex don't neatly match up, or even those for whom it is purely performative, sure.
But they are statistical outliers, and not representative of the majority experience.
People can be different then the statistical norm, and that's ok, but to assert that this norm is entirely cultural is over the top self serving.
There's certainly a non-performative part, I feel it inside of me. But when I'm looking at other people I can't see that, I can only see the performance. Tbh I'm not very good at doing woman despite my internal sense of self. Most of the things people think of in women are not very appealing to me, so I don't do them. And I think it's fair to say a lot of those things, like wearing certain kinds of clothing, are definitely not nature, but arbitrary.
Basically, there's two (maybe more) things going on here both called gender which is very confusing. I'm sure the internal feelings are very correlated to biological factors, but the other parts? No.
There are clearly things that fall under physical differences. People with penises will always find it easy to stand up while peeing, and that affects how bathrooms are arranged. These things fall under their sex.
There are clearly other things that don't fall under those physical differences. Men can have long hair styles, but western culture doesn't usually go that way. That hasn't always been true, it's more common now than it was in the 1950s, and other cultures make entirely different choices for hairstyles between men and women. These things fall under gender.
Which means gender is performative by definition. You fall into society's rules for gender, or you deliberately break them, but it's never something encoded in DNA or anything. If it is, then it's sex, not gender.
Even sex isn't particularly cut and dry (Relevant Radiolab Episode). Here's hoping technologically enabled transhumanism makes it all moot.
My understanding (and it could be incorrect) is that this is more of a definitional/philosophical thing.
Though you are more than welcome to read directly from the source Judith Butler who (to my understanding) first started this theory on gender:
https://www.amherst.edu/system/files/media/1650/butler_performative_acts.pdf
Forgot to add that male and female are not the same as man or woman. The former specifies the sexual characteristics of our species, but the latter is what we call the performance. See: drag queens.
I literally had a moment today where I had to explain to a coworker that some feminine presenting women can have xy chromosomes or swyer syndrome. That apparently jenga towered his cis male beliefs on gender.
The real problem is that studying human behaviour when it comes to gender/sex is inherently flawed as any attempts to isolate nature & nurture would be inhumane. Imagine raising a baby from birth to adulthood never having interacted with another human being just to see whether they portray the behaviours we associate with their gender / sex.
My personal opinion is that it's probably a little of column A, & a little of column B. The higher levels of testosterone in the male sex would naturally lead to higher levels of aggressiveness. But the extent to which that would impact our daily behaviours is a huge unknown. Presumably it accounts for enough to be measurable but not enough to make a difference. But who knows.
P.s If you know more about this than me and have a study that disagrees with me please post it. Haven't done my research as this isn't something I think about day to day.
I think someone in the 1900s tried isolating a baby from human contact and it just died of stress.
That wouldn't even surprise me. I know there is a guy that did some inhumane experiments and is almost universally hated but his studies are still cited because they offer insightful conclusions
A lot of insights in neuroscience and psychology come from tragic incidents rather than experiments. The function of various brain regions has mostly been deduced by studying people with traumatic brain injuries. What little we do know about atypical development in children comes from tragedy as well.
There was a case study of a neglected child who experienced nearly no human contact for most of her life, and she had severe developmental delays compared to everyone else. The doctors mismanaged her care to an absurd degree, but not intentionally. From what they did observe, she was mentally typical outside of her lack of human contact. Her progress mostly stalled because the system didn't let her form meaningful relationships with parental figures. It's a really sad story.
In terms of gender, significant insights have been gained by misguided attempts to treat people with atypical sexual development. Intersex children still regularly undergo "corrective" surgeries to make their genitals fit the male/female binary. Many intersex people come out as transgender, only to realize that their genitals were altered at birth in unnecessary ways.
The doctors have tried to compensate by studying prenatal hormones to more accurately assign genitals, but the whole thing is fundamentally flawed. So long as the genitals don't pose a risk to the child's health, the reasons for doing the surgeries are purely normative. They just want the genitals to fit a binary because having them exist outside the binary is "abnormal," which they see as inherently bad.
............
The surprising truth is that doctors are biased to believe that gender can be forced. It all comes back to persistent philosophical assumptions about identity that date back centuries.
The last case study I'll mention is the case of the guy who was forcibly feminized and gaslit into believing he was a girl. After a botched circumcision that completely destroyed his phallus, David Reimer's parents were told that they should just raise him as female. They touted "Brenda" as proof of gender being arbitrary, even as David began to insist that he was a boy. He was given estrogen and experienced crippling gender dysphoria as a result. When he was finally told the truth, he adopted a male identity.
Sadly, David committed suicide at the age of 38, going public with his story before then. Over the 3 decades that his false story was left uncontested, the view of his psychologist had dominated, doing irreparable damage to gender science. Afterall, if a cis boy could be made a girl, why couldn't intersex and trans people just live as the gender they were told they were?
The truth doesn't just undermine gender, but fundamental biases embedded in most people believe about the world. False ideas can be more useful that unfortunate truths, as believing in free will, believing in self determination, believing that things are just and fair helps the machinery ramble on. You're more likely to succeed if you think you can, so believing we have control of ourselves is appealing.
Be sure to follow the rule before you head out.
Rule: You must post before you leave.